Posted on 06/04/2012 10:29:30 AM PDT by presidio9
At New York City’s Rikers Island Detention Center, where I worked as a chaplain for 23 years until 2007, the solitary confinement unit was called the “bing.” When I asked a prison captain what the term meant, he explained, “When some prisoners come here, their minds go ‘bing.’ ”
Indeed, when I would make visits, walking cell by cell, I was overwhelmed by the lethargy and depression of the inmates.
The damaging effects of isolation are not unique to Rikers inmates. Decades of studies prove that solitary confinement causes severe and lasting harm.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a nationally recognized expert, reported perceptual distortions among the common symptoms described by the hundreds of prisoners he evaluated in solitary confinement.
He highlighted this symptom as especially concerning because perceptual distortions, in which objects shrink or appear to “melt,” are more commonly associated with neurological illnesses, especially seizure disorders and brain tumors, than with psychiatric illness alone.
Dr. Craig Haney, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, found extraordinarily high rates of symptoms of psychological trauma among prisoners held in long-term solitary confinement in his systematic analysis of prisoners held in supermax prison.
More than four out of five of those evaluated suffered from feelings of anxiety and nervousness, headaches and the like, and over half complained of nightmares, heart palpitations and fear of impending nervous breakdowns. Nearly half suffered from hallucinations and a quarter experienced suicidal ideation.
When I worked at Rikers, some prisoners held in solitary experienced this heightened risk of suicide. In fact, responsible inmates were trained to act as Suicide Prevention Aides. Through small glass openings, they monitored the activities of those in isolation cells and reported any self-destructive behavior to the unit officer.
I can imagine the response of some reading confronting these facts: So what? These are convicted criminals. Many are violent offenders. They deserve it.
That’s not how our system is supposed to work. We have prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.
We value our shared decency and humanity.
I understand the need to maintain order and safety in prison. But holding people in isolation until they are mentally broken is not acceptable. And it’s actually no safer for guards and other inmates.
Over the past three decades, numerous state and federal prisons have made long-term solitary confinement a default management tool, subjecting prisoners to conditions of extreme isolation not as a response to violent behavior but rather as a routine practice for minor rule infractions, and for “their own protection.”
Some prisons consist of nothing but single-cell isolation units. Nationwide, an estimated 80,000 persons are kept in these inhumane conditions, sometimes for months and years on end.
Recently, the number of inmates held in “punitive segregation” at Rikers has increased dramatically; today, more than 900 inmates there are being held in their cells for 23 hours per day.
The widespread imposition of solitary confinement
should trouble everyone. Prisoners with mental health disorders suffer debilitating trauma, and studies indicate that prisoners released directly from solitary confinement to society have significantly higher rates of recidivism.
If all that weren’t bad enough, the cost per inmate of solitary confinement far exceeds other types of imprisonment. Indeed, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn recently announced a proposal to close a notorious supermax facility in order to save over $20 million annually.
A handful of other states have adopted measures to rein in the practice, and their outcomes demonstrate there are more efficient, effective and humane alternatives to solitary confinement. For example, Maine’s corrections commissioner, Joseph Ponte, who ushered in reforms leading to a 70% reduction in Maine’s solitary confinement population in 2011, says that “the more data we’re pulling is showing that what we’re doing now is safer than what we were doing before.”
Mississippi’s prison system also had an infamous segregation unit, referred to as Unit 32. As a result of litigation,
the state transferred many of those inmates to the general prison population.
The number of violent incidents requiring guards to use force to restrain prisoners plummeted. Unit 32 was eventually closed.
Every human being has inherent God-given dignity, a quality that does not disappear behind prison gates. Recognizing that prolonged solitary confinement is a cruel form of punishment, people of faith and conscience must work to abolish this indefensible practice.
Many can never be proper members of society. Some can. I’d like to see that they can have the chance.
Other than that, we may have to disagree.
I think one might have to go back in history to understand what “cruel and unusual” punishment means.
One was an article, intended for the layman. The other was a sourced and scholarly article. The second has hard facts, citations, references to experiments, et. al.
Once again, I am unwilling to debate someone who simply waves away hard facts. I've done it enough with liberals.
You may have the last word.
YOU ARE AN ANGEL.
God bless you for your work.
Some of those people are hardened and will not hear your words.
Others will. Those are the ones you are reaching out to.
What a kind reply, than you.
I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em. :)
Well let’s see, the modern prison isn’t cold and dank; doesn’t have gruel to eat. The truth is that the modern version (in the US) of solitary is not some reenactment of Devil’s Island or The Man in the Iron Mask. These prisoners have access to books, music, reading material, writing material, law assists for their cases. They are fed and housed in temperature regulated facilities. Is it heaven??? No not at all. If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime. The people who end up in solitary are there because they are violent to either another prisoner or a guard.
I know someone who spent some serious time in Pelican Bay. He didn’t like it one bit BUT and this is the point he made up his mind to never go back. He has gotten his education. He has changed his life. Even he will tell you that this is what it took for a hardliner like him.
Now I am not saying everyone will do that. But those who want to can.
TORTURE??? Oh please a word thrown around all too frequently. Read Sholshetnizen’s Gulag and then tell me about torture.
You should have a look at what they considered not “cruel and unusual.”
To them, hanging was NOT cruel and unusual. Neither were the stocks, or whipping pole.
TO us, no TV, and a little overcrowding IS cruel an unusual.
I think we have seriously misinterpreted “cruel and unusual.” What they meant were cruel and unusual PUNISHMENTS.
You know: disembowelment, impalement, burning at the stake, pressing (piling stones on top of a person), boiling in oil, the boot, stoning, etc.
All things considered, solitary confinement is pretty benign.
And not every prisoner is an axe murderer.
This is one of many scholarly treatises that disproves your thesis.
There are many others.
Come up with an idea and we’ll talk.
Oh goody a scholarly article......and of course these folks have no axe to grind. No doubt developed and written with the same care that Kinsey used on his studies
Well, it really is, because the symptoms are self-reported -- unless someone actually kills himself.
There isn't an objective way to verify "feelings of anxiety and nervousness, headaches and the like . . . nightmares, heart palpitations and fear of impending nervous breakdowns . . . hallucinations and . . . suicidal ideation." Now, I haven't spent time in a prison, but I suspect most prisoners wouldn't hesitate to lie if they might stand to gain something.
Long-term solitary confinement may not be the ideal, but what's the alternative?
Oh goody somebody who won't evaluate any evidence but that which agrees with their view.
NEXT.
Oh, and FoxInSocks, here's some testimony that supports the research that is NOT from a prisoner with a motive. This is from an article that explored the problems of solitary confinement, and cites Terry Anderson's book, "Den of Lions":
The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the names of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of a succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One was William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day—usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He had a bottle to urinate in and was allotted one five- to ten-minute trip each day to a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.
He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.
His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion—sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages—and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred. He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” he noted.
In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.
“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.”
One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.
Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards’ simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.
Well, I would agree that a very long-term period of solitary confinement has been shown to be detrimental.
Terry Anderson is not really a fair example; he wasn’t confined as punishment for misbehavior, and I’d suggest that his conditions were worse than you’d find in any U.S. prison. Also, he didn’t know if he’d live to see the light of day again, so it would be a pretty hopeless situation; I think that would play heavily into his mindset.
“Let me think on that and see what I can come up with”
Until then, solitary works fine.
Insightful. One more insight please - the press never reports on extrovert criminals - the only time we hear of a personality trait is when the extroverts in the press gush over the fact that a given criminal was a 'loner'. They never report on criminals who hang out in bars with friends etc... What's your take - introvert to extrovert - who fills the prisons?
Thanks, kidd.
I’d never given the introvert v. extrovert much thought. Usually, the quiet one’s gave little trouble, so they were less prominent in the mind than the loud, obnoxious, continual trash talking trouble makers.
I’d say, the extroverts are a majority, as the prison cultures I’ve seen rewarded a certain amount of exhibitionism and self promotion.
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