A mentally
ill inmate under solitary confinement at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth,
Va., peers from behind his cell door, November 29, 2004. (AP
Photo/Virginian-Pilot, Chris Tyree)
For most of the 20th century, a typical stay in
solitary amounted to just a few days, or several weeks in more extreme cases.
Today, it’s not unusual for inmates to spend years at a time in solitary.
Supporters say the practice helps keep prisons safe, but according to the
medical literature, solitary confinement can also take a heavy mental toll.
Does solitary confinement make you crazy?
Researchers have found little to suggest that extreme
isolation is good for the psyche. In one notorious study from the 1950s,
University of Wisconsin psychologist Harry Harlow placed rhesus monkeys inside
a custom-designed solitary chamber nicknamed “the pit of despair.” Shaped like
an inverted pyramid, the chamber had slippery sides that made climbing out all
but impossible. After a day or two, Harlow wrote, “most subjects typically
assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might
presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless.” Harlow
also found that monkeys kept in isolation wound up “profoundly disturbed, given
to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages
repetitively, and mutilating themselves.” Most readjusted eventually, but not
those that had been caged the longest. “Twelve months of isolation almost
obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow found.
Similar studies on human subjects are rare — in part because
most modern universities would never consent to them — but in 1951 researchers
at McGill University paid a group of male graduate students to stay in
small chambers equipped with only a bed for an experiment on sensory
deprivation. They could leave to use the bathroom, but that’s all. They
wore goggles and earphones to limit their sense of sight and hearing, and
gloves to limit their sense of touch. The plan was to observe students for six
weeks, but not one lasted more than seven days. Nearly every student lost the ability
“to think clearly about anything for any length of time,” while several others
began to suffer hallucinations. “One man could see nothing but dogs,” wrote one
of the study’s collaborators, “another nothing but eyeglasses of various types,
and so on.”
What are the effects on prisoners?
In short, not much better. Stuart Grassian, a
board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty member at Harvard Medical
School, has interviewed hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement. In one
study, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “actively
psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” Grassian has since concluded that solitary
can cause a specific psychiatric syndrome, characterized by hallucinations;
panic attacks; overt paranoia; diminished impulse control; hypersensitivity to
external stimuli; and difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory.
Some inmates lose the ability to maintain a state of alertness, while others
develop crippling obsessions.
“One inmate I interviewed developed some obsession with his
inability to feel like his bladder was fully empty,” Grassian told FRONTLINE.
“Literally, that man spent hours, hours, 24 hours a day it was on his mind,
hours standing in front of the toilet trying to pee … He couldn’t do anything
else except focus on that feeling.”
Does
solitary make prisoners more dangerous?
At the very least, solitary can certainly make prisoners
much more of a danger to themselves. Inmates in solitary, for example, have
been found to engage in self-mutilation at rates that are higher than the
general prison population.
Suicide is another major concern. In one study of
California’s prison system, researchers found that from 1999 to 2004 prisoners
in solitary confinement accounted for nearly half of all suicides. A
1995 study of the federal prison system found that 63 percent of suicides
occurred among inmates locked in “special housing status,” such as solitary or
in psychiatric seclusion cells. As one inmate cited in the study explained:
The Hole and Segregation cells are depressing enough to
drive many men to take their lives in order to escape. For some it would appear
to be the only way out. After years of living in the cramped confines of a
segregation cell with no hope of getting out, it is easy to see why a man would
prefer death.
Are the mentally ill allowed in solitary?
Yes. A 2003 report by Human Rights Watch found that anywhere
from one-fifth to two-thirds of prisoners in solitary confinement are believed
to have some form of mental illness. Justice
Department guidelines have recognized that
the mentally ill may not be fit for solitary, as extreme
isolation may cause inmates’ psychiatric conditions to dramatically
deteriorate. In one instance, a mentally ill inmate at the Tamms supermax
prison in Illinois declined to the point where he mutilated his own genitalia.
Is
it possible for inmates to adjust?
It’s tough. In a study of inmates at California’s Pelican
Bay State Prison, psychologist Craig Haney found that prisoners “lose the
ability to initiate or to control their own behavior, or to organize their own
lives.” Haney, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz,
attributed this loss to the near total lack of control that prisoners have over
their day-to-day lives in solitary.Often time, he found, prisoners in solitary
“begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind — to organize their
own lives around activity and purpose.” What results is chronic apathy, lethargy,
depression and despair. “In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop
behaving.”“I’ve had prisoners tell me that the first time they’ve been given an
opportunity to interact with other people, they can’t do it,” Haney told FRONTLINE.
“They don’t come out of their cell … And obviously this social atrophy, the
anxiety which surrounds social interaction can be extremely disabling and
problematic for people who are released from solitary confinement, either
released back into the larger prison community, or even more poignantly,
released from solitary confinement into the larger society.”
The Opinion Pages |OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR from the NY Times
My Night in Solitary
By RICK RAEMISCH FEB. 20, 2014
COLORADO SPRINGS - AT 6:45 p.m. on Jan. 23, I was delivered to a Colorado state penitentiary, where I was issued an inmate uniform and a mesh bag with my toiletries and bedding. My arms were handcuffed behind my back, my legs were shackled and I was deposited in Administrative Segregation - solitary confinement.
I hadn't committed a crime. Instead, as the new head of the state's corrections department, I wanted to learn more about what we call Ad Seg.
Most states now agree that solitary confinement is overused, and many - like New York, which just agreed to a powerful set of reforms this week - are beginning to act. When I was appointed, Gov. John Hickenlooper charged me with three goals: limiting or eliminating the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates; addressing the needs of those who have been in solitary for long periods; and reducing the number of offenders released directly from solitary back into their communities. If I was going to accomplish these, I needed a better sense of what solitary confinement was like, and what it did to the prisoners who were housed there, sometimes for years.
My cell, No. 22, was on the second floor, at the end of what seemed like a very long walk. At the cell, the officers removed my shackles. The door closed and the feed tray door opened. I was told to put my hands through it so the cuffs could be removed. And then I was alone - classified as an R.F.P., or "Removed From Population."
In regular Ad Seg, inmates can have books or TVs. But in R.F.P. Ad Seg, no personal property is allowed. The room is about 7 by 13 feet. What little there is inside - bed, toilet, sink - is steel and screwed to the floor.
First thing you notice is that it's anything but quiet. You're immersed in a drone of garbled noise - other inmates' blaring TVs, distant conversations, shouted arguments. I couldn't make sense of any of it, and was left feeling twitchy and paranoid. I kept waiting for the lights to turn off, to signal the end of the day. But the lights did not shut off. I began to count the small holes carved in the walls. Tiny grooves made by inmates who'd chipped away at the cell as the cell chipped away at them.
Down load "my night in solitary" here: https://ffupstuff.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/my-night-in-solitary.pdf
Excellent articles and studies on Solitary here:
https://solitarytorture.blogspot.com/2016/10/studies-reports-on-solitary.
Solutions are readily available-click below for some of them
1)Overview and plenty of pictures of Mental Health Treatment Center mandated by court order for Womens'prisoner:https://ffupstuff.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stronger.pdf
Former WI DOC Secretary Governor Rick Raemisch Spends one night in Solitary and goe on to transform the Colorado system into something humane
The Opinion Pages |OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR from the NY Times
My Night in Solitary
By RICK RAEMISCH FEB. 20, 2014
COLORADO SPRINGS - AT 6:45 p.m. on Jan. 23, I was delivered to a Colorado state penitentiary, where I was issued an inmate uniform and a mesh bag with my toiletries and bedding. My arms were handcuffed behind my back, my legs were shackled and I was deposited in Administrative Segregation - solitary confinement.
I hadn't committed a crime. Instead, as the new head of the state's corrections department, I wanted to learn more about what we call Ad Seg.
Most states now agree that solitary confinement is overused, and many - like New York, which just agreed to a powerful set of reforms this week - are beginning to act. When I was appointed, Gov. John Hickenlooper charged me with three goals: limiting or eliminating the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates; addressing the needs of those who have been in solitary for long periods; and reducing the number of offenders released directly from solitary back into their communities. If I was going to accomplish these, I needed a better sense of what solitary confinement was like, and what it did to the prisoners who were housed there, sometimes for years.
My cell, No. 22, was on the second floor, at the end of what seemed like a very long walk. At the cell, the officers removed my shackles. The door closed and the feed tray door opened. I was told to put my hands through it so the cuffs could be removed. And then I was alone - classified as an R.F.P., or "Removed From Population."
In regular Ad Seg, inmates can have books or TVs. But in R.F.P. Ad Seg, no personal property is allowed. The room is about 7 by 13 feet. What little there is inside - bed, toilet, sink - is steel and screwed to the floor.
First thing you notice is that it's anything but quiet. You're immersed in a drone of garbled noise - other inmates' blaring TVs, distant conversations, shouted arguments. I couldn't make sense of any of it, and was left feeling twitchy and paranoid. I kept waiting for the lights to turn off, to signal the end of the day. But the lights did not shut off. I began to count the small holes carved in the walls. Tiny grooves made by inmates who'd chipped away at the cell as the cell chipped away at them.
Down load "my night in solitary" here: https://ffupstuff.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/my-night-in-solitary.pdf
Excellent articles and studies on Solitary here:
https://solitarytorture.blogspot.com/2016/10/studies-reports-on-solitary.
Solutions are readily available-click below for some of them
1)Overview and plenty of pictures of Mental Health Treatment Center mandated by court order for Womens'prisoner:https://ffupstuff.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stronger.pdf
2)What Former WI DOC Secretary did for Colorado: https://solitarytorture.blogspot.com/2017/01/colorado-does-it-right.htmltml
3)WISCONSIN AND CO Side by side/CAN WE DO THIS IN WI?
3)WISCONSIN AND CO Side by side/CAN WE DO THIS IN WI?