Buried Alive: Is Solitary Confinement Torture?

In next week’s New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande, Harvard professor and surgeon at the Women’s Hospital of Boston, writes an elegant and harrowing article title Hellhole that explores the question of whether or not solitary confinement is torture.

It is an important inquiry, and Dr. Gawande pulls apart the many sides of this complex moral and legal issue with intelligence, urgency and humanity.

First he looks at the experiences of Americans who were kept in solitary at the hands of others outside the U.S., like journalist Terry Anderson, who was held for seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and John McCain, who spent part his POW years in solitary. Gawande tells us what they said about the soul deteriorating nature of the experience.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”

Then he takes us into the SuperMax confinement of American prisons through the eyes of some of the inmates who have experienced it.

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy….

There is far more, and it all makes for very compelling reading.

As Barack Obama helps us reclaim our Constitutional and moral ideals by making clear that torture is not acceptable as American policy, perhaps it is time that we turn that same spotlight on our state and federal prisons.

This article is the place to start.

Then go here and here.