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Title: Howls from the Hole
Author: Ann Howe
Date: 1992
Language: en
Topics: AJODA, AJODA #34, crime, prison, psychological
Notes: Originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #34, Fall — ’92

Ann Howe

Howls from the Hole

Sensory Deprivation is the reduction of sensory stimulation to a

minimum. It is depriving human beings of all normal contact with their

environment through sight, hearing and movement.

Folsom prison, in California, confines inmates to special cells with

only necessary facilities and enough food to keep them alive. They are

forced to lay quietly on bunks for as long as months at a time. They

call it “Administrative Segregation.” We’ve heard of it as “the hole” or

solitary.

Prison bureaucrats learned from Prisoners of War who have been “softened

up” and prepared for brainwashing by being subjected to solitary

confinement. The experiments have revealed that sensory deprivation can

have marked effects on practically every mental process, although these

effects have varied from subject to subject. The most common emotional

effects are restlessness, boredom, and irritability. Some subjects

enjoyed the experience during the first few hours, but tended to become

apprehensive after two days of isolation. In some cases anxiety rose to

panic proportions: “The quiet was so loud it was like a knife stabbing

through my eardrums.” The effects on thinking processes also increased

as time wore on.

In the first few hours they have found it increasingly hard to

concentrate and control their thoughts. They finally drifted into

daydreaming and incoherent fantasies. A distinct loss in the ability not

only to solve problems but to adjust to novel situations has been found.

There was also a general loss of efficiency in motor ability.

Co-ordination was poorer and reaction time was longer than usual. (If an

inmate in Folsom reacts slowly to a guard’s command they can be punished

further and usually are.)

Two other effects are particularly significant. It has been revealed

that subjects were more easily swayed by propaganda than the ones not

under Administrative Segregation — a fact that helps to explain the use

of isolation in brainwashing. Second, gross perceptual changes

frequently occurred during sensory deprivation. Illusions and even

hallucinations, similar to those produced by mescaline and other drugs

have been experienced.

Although they were in a silent environment, they heard strange music and

chirping birds or saw door knobs on imaginary walls. In trying to hold

on to reality they struggled to recall recent real life events and were

unable to do so.

So far the experiments have indicated beyond much doubt that the human

being cannot continue to function in a normal way if he is deprived of

sensory impressions from the external world. In the absence of

continuous and varied stimulation, all psychological processes tend to

become disrupted and disorganized. The cognitive, perceptual, and

emotional changes associated with and consequent to deprivation leave

the subject less competent to meet the demands of this environment and

the society which he must reenter at some point.

Therefore, while this age old brainwashing technique sometimes works to

control the prison environment it only serves to increase the danger to

the general population.

The hole, adjustment unit, the box, Siberia, Klondike, solitary,

isolation, “Administrative Segregation.”

In one prison, an American Indian had been so uncontrollable that he had

been kept in the hole for years. His cell door had been welded closed.

Eventually, a new warden released him. But by this time he had become

blind. That was in an old prison, but there are uncivilized practices in

some of the newest.

Difficult inmates may be segregated without specific offense or hearing

for months or even years, simply because they are active in prison

politics or just plain ornery. In short, due process has not had a

significant place in that most autocratic of American institutions, the

prison.

Folsom was built in 1890 in Sacramento, California. There, the inmates

that are put in the hole are being punished for such offenses as

fighting, possessing homemade weapons such as nails, or drinking

‘julep’. Most often the complainant is an officer who may or may not be

objective and fair. Nevertheless the officer’s accusation is tantamount

to a finding of guilt, for it is a correctional precept that the

officer’s word must be upheld. For example, if it looks like a fight has

taken place the standard response is to treat the two as equally guilty,

they say weakly, “It takes two to tango,” and lock up both suspects.

Once the inmate has been accused he is put in the hole to wait for a

hearing by the prison bureaucrats. In the hole he is virtually cut off

from everything, including his possessions, and it may be as long as 15

days before he is given the charges against him. This is a further means

of prolonging his tension so that, long before questioning starts, his

thinking may have begun to get distorted. He will have been foraging in

his mind for all possible reasons why he has been imprisoned, and

perhaps finding every answer but the right one. He may even begin to

believe in his speculations as though they were facts.

Confessions can be made which, though largely false, may come to be

believed by both the examiner and the prisoner. This is because the

examiner first suggests that he is guilty of a crime and tries to

convince him. Even if the inmate is innocent, the long tension to which

he has been subjected may well have already frightened him into

suggestibility. If the examination is pressed, he may even begin to play

back an old record — confessing to crimes suggested by the officer in

earlier cross-examinations. The officers, forgetting that the incidents

were originally their own guesswork, are deceived: the prisoner has now

‘spontaneously’ confessed what they have been suspecting all along. It

is not realized that fatigue and anxiety induce suggestibility in the

examiner as well as the prisoner.

This increased suggestibility, or the paradoxical or ultraparadoxical

phase of reaction to stress is most likely to occur when such persons

may be most easily persuaded to make statements which not only increase

their chances of conviction, but even sometimes incriminate themselves

unjustly. Later they may calm down, return to a more normal state of

brain activity, and ask to withdraw these statements. It is then too

late.

The prisoner often spends the entire period before his bureaucratic

hearing, and during it, trying to understand how he came to sign so

damaging a ‘voluntary’ statement as he has given and wonder how to

explain or extricate himself from its implications.

Police have no compunctions about writing practical textbooks on the

subject of how to elicit confessions. The lie detector and urine test

has been found to be wonderfully effective for scaring the inexperienced

into making confessions. Even if a test is negative, the examiner can

still pretend to believe it positive, to help win a confession. ‘Career’

criminals have learned by experience the danger of co-operating in any

form with police questioning or examination and so refuse to answer any

questions at all.

The experienced criminal is handled by “keeping at him” day after day

until he ‘breaks’. They get him into a mental corner, a wedge in as a

start, which is his weak spot. Once the weak spot is found the prisoner

becomes confused, all his defenses have been beaten down. He’s cornered,

trapped. That’s when he breaks. The torture comes from his own mind, not

from the outside.

With such a technique, truth and falsehood can get hopelessly confused

in the minds of both the suspect and the examiner; and if what he calls

a “weak spot” is not present, the police examiner determined to get a

confession can create it by suggestion. The prisoner has merely given

back what has been originally implied or suggested. They have both been

brainwashed.

Major A. Farrar-Hockley gave a description of the technique by which

ideas can be implanted without the use of strong, direct and obvious

suggestion. He had been a British prisoner of war in Korea. “The Chinese

are past masters of this technique. They wouldn’t tell me what they

really wanted. Whenever .we got near to something substantial, they

would immediately come back to it from another angle and we’d go all

round it, but I’d never find out what it was. And then they would go

away and leave me thinking. I believe if the interrogator went on long

enough with someone who is in a very weak state, and then sprang the

idea suddenly on him, the chap would seize on it and become obsessed by

it. He would begin to say, ‘Well, I wonder whether in fact it’s all

really true, and this is what I was thinking in the first place.’ Every

time they went away I spent hours saying, ‘Now was it that? No, it

couldn’t have been that. I wonder if it was so and so?’ and that’s what

they were trying to do. They were trying to get me to a state when the

idea would suddenly come, and I would begin to wonder whether I’d

thought of it or they had. Now another method is to gradually suggest

something by talking round it and getting a little nearer each time and

just giving a fragment so that you build up the idea in your mind. And

they say, ‘But you said this, we didn’t’ and you would think you had.”

Of course, for this technique to work the prisoner must be put in

segregation where the sensory deprivation is greatest.

In the years 1644–1646 women suspected of being witches were also put in

the hole with nothing so that the official witch-finders could gain

their confession. The U.S. Justice Department shares a long and

distinguished career with witch hunters, the Inquisition, the Russian

purges, and Chinese torturers.

Post-Script: You have to go through hell to get there...

If you’re planning on going to hell, get up early. A lot of people are

in line already at the airport ahead of you. I took the cheapest flight,

which turned out to be a “milk run.” No, they don’t serve milk or any

food for that matter. Plan on fasting. It took off from San Antonio,

landed in El Paso, took off from there and landed in San Diego and then

landed in San Francisco. The pilot flying that plane had to be the very

best at landing aircraft as he had a lot of practice that day. Catching

a flight to Sacramento isn’t easy, either. United wanted as much for it

as I had paid to come all the way from Texas. I considered taking a bus

but being a true Texan, I decided I’d had enough of public

transportation and rented a car.

Don’t ever take directions from someone at an airport. They want you to

see the countryside, at 200 miles per hour. These people are in a hurry

out here. After traveling some distance north, when I should have been

going northeast I spotted a beloved McDonald’s in the middle of nowhere,

where I received a sugar fix and valid directions.

To enter the gates of hell, get up early. There are a lot of rules and

it takes time to get it right. First of all you can’t take anything with

you except your ID. Even pens and pencils are not allowed. This means

you have to keep every instruction in your head. For instance, you have

to wear underwear. Now, who would have thought of that? (Buy a bra,

girls!)

Folsom State Prison is clean. In fact, there are inmates all over the

place mopping, sweeping, raking, etc. The “corrections officers” in the

visiting room were polite.

The inmate that I had come half way across the country to visit had been

placed in the hole a few days before my arrival. That meant our visit

would have to be behind glass, on a telephone and could only last one

and one-half hours instead of the usual six hours in the regular

visiting room. These are large rooms with snack machines and tables and

chairs where many others are visiting at the same time. Usually an

inmate is allowed a ‘greeting’ which can only be one kiss and one hug at

the beginning of the visit, nothing at the end, or in-between, or at any

other time. No holding hands please!

No one on the outside can possibly imagine what it means to someone to

have contact with normality. Things like a radio, letter, newspaper,

books, can mean the difference between the life and death of a person’s

spirit, soul and mind. It’s survival of the personal self.

The “goon squad” is a group of officers dressed like a SWAT team or the

Delta Force. They bring the inmate up from the hole by handcuffing his

wrists behind his back, and putting on leg irons which are all attached

to a chain around the waist. When the inmate leaves the visiting cell he

backs up to a slot in the steel room with his wrists behind him. He is

hooked up to other inmates and marched back down to the depths of hell,

to total sensory deprivation: no radio, no TV, no food, no heat, no

shower, no personal belongings, no hygiene, nothing, nothing, nothing.