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The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary
confinement. Is this torture?
by Atul Gawande March 30, 2009
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense
that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on
others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal
human being requires interaction with other people.
Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow
to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging
parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage
independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby
rhesus monkeys.
He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money
for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of
importing them from India. Because he didn t know how to raise infant monkeys,
he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants in
nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from
other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy,
disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also
profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long
periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.
At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn t figure out what the problem
was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the
antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating
biography of Harlow, Love at Goon Park, one of his researchers noticed how
tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what
the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd
experiment, he gave them an artificial one.
In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other
was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem
more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire
mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it.
They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused
replacements: they wanted only their mother. If sharp spikes were made to
randomly thrust out of the mother s body when the rhesus babies held it, they
waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No
matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys
remained psychologically abnormal.
In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers
found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary
monkeys, usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . .
autistic self-clutching and rocking. Harlow noted, One of six monkeys
isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days
later. After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them
adjusted but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. Twelve months
of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially, Harlow wrote. They
became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts regularly set upon, as
if inviting abuse.
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The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too revulsion at his work helped
spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of
similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children.
Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely
accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just for food and
protection but also for the normal functioning of their brains.
We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are
fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw
upon. We wouldn t have anything like a child s dependence on other people,
right? Yet it seems that we do. We don t have a lot of monkey experiments to
call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones,
including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly
unsettling.
Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate
themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance,
commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors:
thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single
most overwhelming difficulty they report is the soul-destroying loneliness,
as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to
tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend
on radio and video communications for social contact.
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 fianc e 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.
It s an awful thing, solitary, John McCain wrote of his five and a half years
as a prisoner of war in Vietnam more than two years of it spent in isolation in
a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except
by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against
the wall. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively
than any other form of mistreatment. And this comes from a man who was beaten
regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg,
and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again.
A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned
from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain,
reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as
any physical abuse they suffered.
And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the
nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a
week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war,
released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former
Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain
abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had
endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes,
solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may
become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.
On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been
the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron
Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving
team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years
afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of
being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They
can t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are
optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns
prove difficult to re stablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks,
they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their
freedom.
For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by
phone recently, it was just kind of a fog. He had done many television
interviews at the time. And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my
eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.
Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships,
marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that
the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as
anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If
prolonged isolation is as research and experience have confirmed for decades so
objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison
system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country
in history has?
Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a
prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home.
Bobby Dellelo was, to say the least, no Terry Anderson or John McCain. Brought
up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston s West End, in the nineteen-forties,
he was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he
recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and
his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their
merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his
childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he
learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick
locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna,
which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet.
Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole
from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did
stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in
Dorchester.
What a disaster that thing was, he recalls, laughing. They put the store s
owner and the customers in a walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, took their
wallets, and went to rob the register. But more customers came in. So they
robbed them and put them in the refrigerator, too. Then still more customers
arrived, the refrigerator got full, and the whole thing turned into a circus.
Dellelo and his partner finally escaped. But one of the customers identified
him to the police. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for
robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the
first conviction and two and a half years for the second.
Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend
tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went
off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend
shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed
himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in
prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in
isolation.
The criteria for the isolation of prisoners vary by state but typically include
not only violent infractions but also violation of prison rules or association
with gang members. The imposition of long-term isolation which can be for
months or years is ultimately at the discretion of prison administrators. One
former prisoner I spoke to, for example, recalled being put in solitary
confinement for petty annoyances like refusing to get out of the shower quickly
enough. Bobby Dellelo was put there for escaping.
It was an elaborate scheme. He had a partner, who picked the lock to a
supervisor s office and got hold of the information manual for the
microwave-detection system that patrolled a grassy no man s land between the
prison and the road. They studied the manual long enough to learn how to
circumvent the system and returned it. On Halloween Sunday, 1993, they had
friends stage a fight in the prison yard. With all the guards in the towers
looking at the fight through binoculars, the two men tipped a picnic table up
against a twelve-foot wall and climbed it like a ladder. Beyond it, they scaled
a sixteen-foot fence. To get over the razor wire on top, they used a Z-shaped
tool they d improvised from locker handles. They dropped down into the no man s
land and followed an invisible path that they d calculated the microwave system
would not detect. No alarm sounded. They went over one more fence, walked
around a parking lot, picked their way through some woods, and emerged onto a
four-lane road. After a short walk to a convenience store, they called a taxi
from a telephone booth and rolled away before anyone knew they were gone.
They lasted twenty-four days on the outside. Eventually, somebody ratted them
out, and the police captured them on the day before Thanksgiving, at the house
of a friend in Cambridge. The prison administration gave Dellelo five years in
the Departmental Disciplinary Unit of the Walpole prison, its
hundred-and-twenty-four-cell super-maximum segregation unit.
Wearing ankle bracelets, handcuffs, and a belly chain, Dellelo was marched into
a thirteen-by-eight-foot off-white cell. A four-inch-thick concrete bed slab
jutted out from the wall opposite the door. A smaller slab protruding from a
side wall provided a desk. A cylindrical concrete block in the floor served as
a seat. On the remaining wall was a toilet and a metal sink. He was given four
sheets, four towels, a blanket, a bedroll, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a tall
clear plastic cup, a bar of soap, seven white T-shirts, seven pairs of boxer
shorts, seven pairs of socks, plastic slippers, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint
pen. A speaker with a microphone was mounted on the door. Cells used for
solitary confinement are often windowless, but this one had a ribbonlike window
that was seven inches wide and five feet tall. The electrically controlled door
was solid steel, with a seven-inch-by-twenty-eight-inch aperture and two
wickets little door slots, one at ankle height and one at waist height, for
shackling him whenever he was let out and for passing him meal trays.
As in other supermaxes facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social
contact Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day
and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that
he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as the dog
kennel. He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell,
and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of
fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from
his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners
could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one
phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per
month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with
anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use
food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick
that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The
rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty
days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.
This is going to be a piece of cake, Dellelo recalls thinking when the door
closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners and most P.O.W.s
and hostages have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he
was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting
down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going
to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient.
This is their sophisticated security? he said to himself. They don t know
what they re doing.
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 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. Many
prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.
There were some guards in D.D.U. who were decent guys, Dellelo told me. They
didn t trash his room when he was let out for a shower, or try to trip him when
escorting him in chains, or write him up for contraband if he kept food or a
salt packet from a meal in his cell. But some of them were evil, evil pricks.
One correctional officer became a particular obsession. Dellelo spent hours
imagining cutting his head off and rolling it down the tier. I mean, I know
this is insane thinking, he says now. Even at the time, he added, I had a
fear in the background like how much of this am I going to be able to let go?
How much is this going to affect who I am?
He was right to worry. Everyone s identity is socially created: it s through
your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a
teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation,
many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see
themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is
rooted in thwarting prison control.
As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the
Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy
constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied.
Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so
their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our
supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings,
prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in
order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or
free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can t handle profound
isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. And those who have
adapted, Haney writes, are prime candidates for release to a social world to
which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.
Dellelo eventually found a way to resist that would not prolong his ordeal. He
fought his battle through the courts, filing motion after motion in an effort
to get his conviction overturned. He became so good at submitting his claims
that he obtained a paralegal certificate along the way. And, after forty years
in prison, and more than five years in solitary, he got his
first-degree-homicide conviction reduced to manslaughter. On November 19, 2003,
he was freed.
Bobby Dellelo is sixty-seven years old now. He lives on Social Security in a
Cambridge efficiency apartment that is about four times larger than his cell.
He still seems to be adjusting to the world outside. He lives alone. To the
extent that he is out in society, it is, in large measure, as a combatant. He
works for prisoners rights at the American Friends Service Committee. He also
does occasional work assisting prisoners with their legal cases. Sitting at his
kitchen table, he showed me how to pick a padlock you know, just in case I ever
find myself in trouble.
But it was impossible to talk to him about his time in isolation without seeing
that it was fundamentally no different from the isolation that Terry Anderson
and John McCain had endured. Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human
beings experience isolation as torture.
The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides
discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules when
they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers
wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less
stringent measures haven t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And
it s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others.
So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don t recognize
this are dangerously na ve.
The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from
the general prison population and put in isolation, you d expect there to be
markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the
evidence doesn t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether
supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining
the experience in three states Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota following the
opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of
inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff
violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and
holding steady in Minnesota.
Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In
the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate
but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out
of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has
been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness a nice
formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the
violence doesn t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens.
Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United
States now has five per cent of the world s population, twenty-five per cent of
its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term
solitary confinement.
It wasn t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost
exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States
Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional.
Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held
in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had
revealed serious objections to solitary confinement:
A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement,
into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse
them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide;
while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in
most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent
service to the community.
Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for
almost a century. Our first supermax our first institution specifically
designed for mass solitary confinement was not established until 1983, in
Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California s first
supermax admitted that the conditions hover on the edge of what is humanly
tolerable for those with normal resilience. But it did not rule them to be
unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The
prison s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose a sufficiently
high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness. In other
words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the
isolation didn t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood.
By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had
opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established
within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.
The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary
levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in
supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in
restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the
government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to
the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and
Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in
isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone
held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax twelve per cent of its prisoners
over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their
inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five
supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be
described as being soft on crime.
Advocates of solitary confinement are left with a single argument for
subjecting thousands of people to years of isolation: What else are we supposed
to do? How else are we to deal with the violent, the disruptive, the prisoners
who are just too dangerous to be housed with others?
As it happens, only a subset of prisoners currently locked away for long
periods of isolation would be considered truly dangerous. Many are escapees or
suspected gang members; many others are in solitary for nonviolent breaches of
prison rules. Still, there are some highly dangerous and violent prisoners who
pose a serious challenge to prison discipline and safety. In August, I met a
man named Robert Felton, who had spent fourteen and a half years in isolation
in the Illinois state correctional system. He is now thirty-six years old. He
grew up in the predominantly black housing projects of Danville, Illinois, and
had been a force of mayhem from the time he was a child.
His crimes were mainly impulsive, rather than planned. The first time he was
arrested was at the age of eleven, when he and a relative broke into a house to
steal some Atari video games. A year later, he was sent to state reform school
after he and a friend broke into an abandoned building and made off with paint
cans, irons, and other property that they hardly knew what to do with. In
reform school, he got into fights and screamed obscenities at the staff. When
the staff tried to discipline him by taking away his recreation or his
television privileges, his behavior worsened. He tore a pillar out of the
ceiling, a sink and mirrors off the wall, doors off their hinges. He was put in
a special cell, stripped of nearly everything. When he began attacking
counsellors, the authorities transferred him to the maximum-security juvenile
facility at Joliet, where he continued to misbehave.
Felton wasn t a sociopath. He made friends easily. He was close to his family,
and missed them deeply. He took no pleasure in hurting others. Psychiatric
evaluations turned up little more than attention-deficit disorder. But he had a
terrible temper, a tendency to escalate rather than to defuse confrontations,
and, by the time he was released, just before turning eighteen, he had achieved
only a ninth-grade education.
Within months of returning home, he was arrested again. He had walked into a
Danville sports bar and ordered a beer. The barman took his ten-dollar bill.
Then he says, Naw, man, you can t get no beer. You re underage, Felton
recounts. I says, Well, give me my ten dollars back. He says, You ain t
getting shit. Get the hell out of here.
Felton stood his ground. The bartender had a pocket knife on the counter. And,
when he went for it, I went for it, Felton told me. When I grabbed the knife
first, I turned around and spinned on him. I said, You think you re gonna cut
me, man? You gotta be fucked up.
The barman had put the ten-dollar bill in a Royal Crown bag behind the counter.
Felton grabbed the bag and ran out the back door. He forgot his car keys on the
counter, though. So he went back to get the keys the stupid keys, he now says
ruefully and in the fight that ensued he left the barman severely injured and
bleeding. The police caught Felton fleeing in his car. He was convicted of
armed robbery, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery, and
served fifteen years in prison.
He was eventually sent to the Stateville Correctional Center, a
maximum-security facility in Joliet. Inside the overflowing prison, he got into
vicious fights over insults and the like. About three months into his term,
during a shakedown following the murder of an inmate, prison officials turned
up a makeshift knife in his cell. (He denies that it was his.) They gave him a
year in isolation. He was a danger, and he had to be taught a lesson. But it
was a lesson that he seemed incapable of learning.
Felton s Stateville isolation cell had gray walls, a solid steel door, no
window, no clock, and a light that was kept on twenty-four hours a day. As soon
as he was shut in, he became claustrophobic and had a panic attack. Like
Dellelo, Anderson, and McCain, he was soon pacing back and forth, talking to
himself, studying the insects crawling around his cell, reliving past events
from childhood, sleeping for as much as sixteen hours a day. But, unlike them,
he lacked the inner resources to cope with his situation.
Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape.
Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their
heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team
rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he d seen.
Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B.
defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for
three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact
except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg,
Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have
them discovered and swept away).
But Felton would just yell, Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard!, or bang his
cup on the toilet, for hours. He could spend whole days hallucinating that he
was in another world, that he was a child at home in Danville, playing in the
streets, having conversations with imaginary people. Small cruelties that
others somehow bore in quiet fury getting no meal tray, for example sent him
into a rage. Despite being restrained with handcuffs, ankle shackles, and a
belly chain whenever he was taken out, he managed to assault the staff at least
three times. He threw his food through the door slot. He set his cell on fire
by tearing his mattress apart, wrapping the stuffing in a sheet, popping his
light bulb, and using the exposed wires to set the whole thing ablaze. He did
this so many times that the walls of his cell were black with soot.
After each offense, prison officials extended his sentence in isolation. Still,
he wouldn t stop. He began flooding his cell, by stuffing the door crack with
socks, plugging the toilet, and flushing until the water was a couple of feet
deep. Then he d pull out the socks and the whole wing would flood with
wastewater.
Flooding the cell was the last option for me, Felton told me. It was when I
had nothing else I could do. You know, they took everything out of my cell, and
all I had left was toilet water. I d sit there and I d say, Well, let me see
what I can do with this toilet water.
Felton was not allowed out again for fourteen and a half years. He spent almost
his entire prison term, from 1990 to 2005, in isolation. In March, 1998, he was
among the first inmates to be moved to Tamms, a new, high-tech supermax
facility in southern Illinois.
At Tamms, man, it was like a lab, he says. Contact even with guards was
tightly reduced. Cutoff valves meant that he couldn t flood his cell. He had
little ability to force a response negative or positive from a human being.
And, with that gone, he began to deteriorate further. He ceased showering,
changing his clothes, brushing his teeth. His teeth rotted and ten had to be
pulled. He began throwing his feces around his cell. He became psychotic.
It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic.
Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred
prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal
challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third
developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability
that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction a
history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy,
or, as in Felton s case, a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian
saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom
solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively
equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.
A psychiatrist tried giving Felton anti-psychotic medication. Mostly, it made
him sleep sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch, he said. Twice he attempted
suicide. The first time, he hanged himself in a noose made from a sheet. The
second time, he took a single staple from a legal newspaper and managed to
slash the radial artery in his left wrist with it. In both instances, he was
taken to a local emergency room for a few hours, patched up, and sent back to
prison.
Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for
example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners
who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought
a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of
Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The
authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in
the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in
prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States,
they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public
outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another
approach.
Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that
focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more
brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple
observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave
perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a
critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British
noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding
humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions
maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a
trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.
So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control,
rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for
work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills.
The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in
individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In
these reformed Close Supervision Centres, prisoners could receive
mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls,
contact visits, and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to
air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to
track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.
The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is
now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in extreme
custody than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of
Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention,
achieved a similar outcome.
In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the
Commission on Safety and Abuse in America s Prisons, released its
recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term
isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no
benefits can be found and the harm is clear not just for inmates but for the
public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society,
after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax
conditions in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are
given no programmatic support make it highly likely that they will commit more
crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the
preventive approaches used in European countries.
The recommendations went nowhere, of course. Whatever the evidence in its
favor, people simply did not believe in the treatment.
I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He
was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a
commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years.
He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has
worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term
isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses
that many of them have.
Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone s best interest, he told me.
He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. A bad violation
should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go
beyond that.
He is apparently not alone among prison officials. Over the years, he has come
to know commissioners in nearly every state in the country. I believe that
today you ll probably find that two-thirds or three-fourths of the heads of
correctional agencies will largely share the position that I articulated with
you, he said.
Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with
the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven t they? He told me what happened
when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called
for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections
officers called members of the crime victim s family and told them that he d
gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless
for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public
opinion.
This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates
came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guant namo Bay,
where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither
Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether
prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no
less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide.
The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that
solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western
nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American
exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of
thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a
century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners
made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of
foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America s moral stature in the
world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans
countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture.
And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary
confinement on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison,
for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.
Robert Felton drifted in and out of acute psychosis for much of his solitary
confinement. Eventually, however, he found an unexpected resource. One day,
while he was at Tamms, he was given a new defense lawyer, and, whatever
expertise this lawyer provided, the more important thing was genuine human
contact. He visited regularly, and sent Felton books. Although some were
rejected by the authorities and Felton was restricted to a few at a time, he
devoured those he was permitted. I liked political books, he says. From
Beirut to Jerusalem, Winston Churchill, Noam Chomsky.
That small amount of contact was a lifeline. Felton corresponded with the
lawyer about what he was reading. The lawyer helped him get his G.E.D. and a
paralegal certificate through a correspondence course, and he taught Felton how
to advocate for himself. Felton began writing letters to politicians and prison
officials explaining the misery of his situation, opposing supermax isolation,
and asking for a chance to return to the general prison population. (The
Illinois Department of Corrections would not comment on Felton s case, but a
spokesman stated that Tamms houses the most disruptive, violent, and
problematic inmates. ) Felton was persuasive enough that Senator Paul Simon, of
Illinois, wrote him back and, one day, even visited him. Simon asked the
director of the State Department of Corrections, Donald Snyder, Jr., to give
consideration to Felton s objections. But Snyder didn t budge. If there was
anyone whom Felton fantasized about taking revenge upon, it was Snyder. Felton
continued to file request after request. But the answer was always no.
On July 12, 2005, at the age of thirty-three, Felton was finally released. He
hadn t socialized with another person since entering Tamms, at the age of
twenty-five. Before his release, he was given one month in the general prison
population to get used to people. It wasn t enough. Upon returning to society,
he found that he had trouble in crowds. At a party of well-wishers, the volume
of social stimulation overwhelmed him and he panicked, headed for a bathroom,
and locked himself in. He stayed at his mother s house and kept mostly to
himself.
For the first year, he had to wear an ankle bracelet and was allowed to leave
home only for work. His first job was at a Papa John s restaurant, delivering
pizzas. He next found work at the Model Star Laundry Service, doing pressing.
This was a steady job, and he began to settle down. He fell in love with a
waitress named Brittany. They moved into a three-room house that her
grandmother lent them, and got engaged. Brittany became pregnant.
This is not a story with a happy ending. Felton lost his job with the laundry
service. He went to work for a tree-cutting business; a few months later, it
went under. Meanwhile, he and Brittany had had a second child. She had found
work as a certified nursing assistant, but her income wasn t nearly enough. So
he took a job forty miles away, at Plastipak, the plastics manufacturer, where
he made seven-fifty an hour inspecting Gatorade bottles and Crisco containers
as they came out of the stamping machines. Then his twenty-year-old Firebird
died. The bus he had to take ran erratically, and he was fired for repeated
tardiness.
When I visited Felton in Danville last August, he and Brittany were upbeat
about their prospects. She was working extra shifts at a nursing home, and he
was taking care of their children, ages one and two. He had also applied to a
six-month training program for heating and air-conditioning technicians.
I could make twenty dollars an hour after graduation, he said.
He s a good man, Brittany told me, taking his arm and giving him a kiss.
But he was out of work. They were chronically short of money. It was hard to be
optimistic about Felton s prospects. And, indeed, six weeks after we met, he
was arrested for breaking into a car dealership and stealing a Dodge Charger.
He pleaded guilty and, in January, began serving a seven-year sentence.
Before I left town when there was still a glimmer of hope for him we went out
for lunch at his favorite place, a Mexican restaurant called La Potosina. Over
enchiladas and Cokes, we talked about his family, Danville, the economy, and,
of course, his time in prison. The strangest story had turned up in the news,
he said. Donald Snyder, Jr., the state prison director who had refused to let
him out of solitary confinement, had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to
two years in prison for taking fifty thousand dollars in payoffs from
lobbyists.
Two years in prison, Felton marvelled. He could end up right where I used to
be.
I asked him, If he wrote to you, asking if you would release him from
solitary, what would you do?
Felton didn t hesitate for a second. If he wrote to me to let him out, I d let
him out, he said.
This surprised me. I expected anger, vindictiveness, a desire for retribution.
You d let him out? I said.
I d let him out, he said, and he put his fork down to make the point. I
wouldn t wish solitary confinement on anybody. Not even him.
difficulties with irrational anger, not three per cent of prisoners in the
general population, as originally stated.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande