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.
One day I explained to the class that I was no different than any of them and that I too have broke the law, but more importantly I had in me the same poisons, junk, perversions, anger, hatred, greed that any of them had. In fact I knew how to shoot, carried a side arm and could probably shoot better than most of them, and could kill too. After getting raised eyebrows and a few chuckles from the guys about my sins and insights, they went back to their school work and this troublemaker kid came up to me and asked me more about shooting as he liked guns.
The next day he was in the classroom very angry and was taking it out on the men, knocking things over, throwing stuff, etc. Rather than call the guards, I called him over to the desk and pulled out a chair and said lets talk. I didn't care about the class anymore but just him....I could tell he was in a crisis. He told me when he came to prison several years ago they put him in solitary confinement for months. In fact when the guards gave him food, he would wait and throw it back in there face.
He was a walking time bomb.
We must have talked close to half an hour and during that time I kept loving him. What else could I do? What do you tell a 19 year old who will be spending the rest of his life in prison. What do you say to this man.......you shouldn't have done it, serves you right, that it would get better, everything would be fine, have a great life?
Finally he asked me about his acne on his face. I explained to him it was actually a good thing as it met he was making a lot of the hormone testosterone and that met he was healthy. It would eventually clear up. He was so concerned that girls would not like his acne. I explained that when a girl loved him she would not see his acne but instead his heart.
You know, for just that brief time as he and I talked, the prison room was suspended and the two of us were not there anymore, we were somewhere else talking and sharing and liking each other with no thoughts of our surroundings or the fact that he was facing a life sentence with no girl ever to be in his life. We were so free in those minutes.....I will never forget it.
He thanked me and went back and settled down. I waited to catch him the next day as he went to another class and I asked him how he was doing and he said fine. He seemed less tense.
I just know that these men who are put in solitary confinement have so much repressed rage. I could see it in this young man, you could cut it with a knife it was so thick. I know it takes skills and knowledge to deal with this rage and how to release it both in these men and/or professionals who help. A good way is called a release technique. I was releasing in me and consequently he released.
Solitary confinement certainly gets their attention but it is not rehabilitative....AND...the REABILITATIVE PROCESS STARTS WITH ME, not the criminal.
There is a building next to the building used as a classroom. The guard told me it is for the worst of the worst criminals. They are let out of their isolation cells for one hour a day and when they take a shower, they are handcuffed. It's pretty bad in there. I look at that bleak building across the yard and ask God to help. Those men and the people they hurt badly, affect all of us. We are all like a comb (an example I read one time) depending on the angle you view the comb- from the tooth perspective we are each individuals, independent, isolated, row after row, but when you turn the comb around we all come from the same source.
Jane