So, why do we do this to people? Let's just walk through a brief history of solitary confinement as practiced in the United States. The world's first penitentiary was the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia. So, before this jail, we did not punish people with a time in prison. Rather, we would hold people in a jail until they stood trial, and then they would be punished in a variety of ways. They might be exiled, they might be condemned to death, they might be punished physically with lashings or weeping, they might be publicly humiliated. But until the Walnut Street Jail was transformed into a prison or a penitentiary, we did not punish people with this sentence of a specific period of time in confinement. The penitentiary system was introduced, in part, as a humane alternative to corporal and capital punishment. And as a way of punishing people that seemed more in line with liberal democracy. So Eastern State Penitentiary was the first purpose built Penitentiary in the United States. And you can see if you look at images of Eastern state, that it was built in a way that almost looks like a castle. These penitentiaries were designed as places of penance, a place that was imagined as a site where prisoners could undergo a kind of spiritual transformation, that they may not be willing to do voluntarily but that they would be forced into. A kind of spiritual death and resurrection by virtue of being in a quiet place where they had nothing to do but to contemplate the future of their souls. You can tour Eastern State Penitentiary now it has been turned into a museum. And I've been there, it's quite an amazing place. It does feel sort of like a cathedral at certain points. But the experience of people in solitary confinement which was the norm at Eastern State Penitentiary did not necessarily match the expectations of the architects of the penitentiary system. Like the prisoners in contemporary supermax prisons, prisoners at Eastern State Penitentiary were isolated in typically a windowless cell, and they had just a windowless exercise yard with high walls to retreat to for restricted periods of the day. At Eastern State Penitentiary, this was built before the prison had access to electric light, and so there were just little skylights in the ceiling that were called the 'god's eye'. Imagining that the prisoner in this dark tomb-like environment would be forced to reorient their soul upwards towards God and towards a kind of spiritual renewal if they were given that just one sliver of light that came from above. Benjamin Rush is one of the founding fathers and signers of the Declaration of Independence and he was a very strong supporter of penal reform in the United States. He wrote in 1787 an essay called, 'An Inquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishment,' in which he decried the effect on prisoners and/or — both the punished or the condemned, and on the public of typical forms of punishment such as public flogging and humiliation. And he imagined the penitentiary as a space where spiritual renewal would respect the dignity of the prisoner. This is the way he imagined people would come out the other end from this experience of penitence, forced penitence in prison. Rush wrote, "I am so perfectly satisfied of the truth of this opinion that people would be improved by solitary confinement. That methinks I already hear the inhabitants of our villages and townships counting the years that shall complete the reformation of one of their citizens. I behold them running to meet him on the day of his deliverance, — His friends and family bathe his cheeks with tears of joy, and the universal shout of the neighborhood is, 'This our brother was lost and is found — was dead and is alive'.". So, I think it's striking that Rush imagines this reformation or rehabilitation process as a kind of death and resurrection. Because this is the way that many prisoners actually describe their experience in solitary confinement, as a kind of death, a sort of internment in a tomb as an experience of being buried alive. That did not necessarily have the kind of resurrecting effects that Benjamin Rush imagined. So for example, Charles Dickens came to the United States to tour our prisons and penitentiaries, and to see what the effects of these penitentiaries, these bold new experiments and punishment had on prisoners. In American Notes, which was published in 1842, Dickens wrote about his observations of people in solitary confinement. For example, he writes "Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell for which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He is a man buried alive to be dug out in the slow round of years. And in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair." So needless to say Dickens was — he was shocked and appalled by what he saw in Eastern State Penitentiary and other prisons in the United States. And he did not endorse that form of punishment whatsoever. So, if it was clear to Dickens already in the first decades of the practice of solitary confinement in prison, that this had a terrible effect on people and and amounted to a form of being buried alive, then why is it that we still practice solitary confinement? And why is it that an increasingly young and already marginalized population is subject to solitary confinement in United States prisons, jails and detention centers? To tell the story of the emergence of the contemporary supermax, we have to go into what might seem like a brief detour into cold war sensory deprivation research. So this was research that was funded by the Department of Defense and by other U.S. agencies that emerged in the wake of the Korean War, where U.S. prisoners of war came back saying, "The Chinese have these methods of breaking a person down and building them back up." Or, "Of mind control and brainwashing and that they use sensory deprivation as one element in these techniques." And so the U.S. military and Department of Defense and the CIA wanted to do research into sensory deprivation, both to see how U.S. military officials and potential prisoners of war could resist brainwashing and also to experiment ways in which they might be able to use these practices themselves, as we'll see. So Donald Hebb was one of the researchers who was contracted to do this sort of sensory deprivation research in the 1950s. And he set up a lab in which volunteers, many of whom were college students, were put in a kind of outfit where they couldn't touch themselves. They had cardboard cuffs on their arms so they wouldn't even feel their hands touching the rest of their body. They had blindfolds and earmuffs, and every effort was made to dim and diminish their sensory experience. And some of Hebbs own researchers, so scientists themselves, also subjected themselves to this practice and recorded their experience. So here's one bit of testimony from a researcher, a scientific researcher who subjected himself to six days of sensory deprivation in Donald Hebbes lab. He said, "The whole room is undulating swirling... The wall is waving all over the place -- a horrifying sight. As a matter of fact... The center of that curtain over there — it just swirls downward undulates and waves inside... I find it difficult to keep my eyes open for any length of time. The visual field is in such a state of chaos... Everything will settle down for a moment then it will start to go all over the place.". So, I hear resonances between this sort of testimony and the kind of testimony from solitary confinement prisoners even today who say that they experience perceptual distortions in their cells. One of the main ways that we see this in cells today is if there's a wire mesh door or some kind of wire mesh window, you will often see the mesh in that wire moving and it won't settle down. They can't focus their eyes in a way that will make that settle down. Typically solitary confinement cells are painted gray or white or off white. And so this heightens the sensory deprivation experience in contemporary supermax prisons. So what was done with this research? Well, in 1961, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, organized a conference called 'The Power to Change Behavior', in which they brought together researchers who had done experiments in sensory deprivation with wardens, prison wardens and correctional officials. So, James V. Bennett, who was the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1937 to 1964, concluded the conference with these words. Quote, "We have a tremendous opportunity here to carry on some of the experimenting to which the various panelists have alluded. We here in Washington are anxious to have you undertake some of these things. Do things perhaps on your own. Undertake a little experiment of what you can do with the Muslims. Undertake a little experiment with what you can do with some of the sociopathic individuals. You are thoughtful people with lots of opportunity to experiment. There's lots of research to do. Do it as individuals, do it as groups, and let us know the results.". So this was basically carte blanche to experiment on prisoners and to target prisoners who were seen as disruptive and who were politically organizing within the prison, such as Black Muslims who were identified with the — or who were part of the Nation of Islam, who were building power and resistance within prisons in the early 1960s and who were seen as a threat to prison management. So, it was beginning with these, the sort of open invitation to experiment on prisoners that a number of very intense sensory deprivation experiments were made on prisoners in federal and state prisons. These experiments eventually led to the birth of the supermax prison which has been normalized across the United States today. So, the first sort of de facto supermax prison was the United States penitentiary at Marion, which was built in 1963 to replace Alcatraz. The prison implemented experimental programs such as CARE, that's an acronym for 'Control and Rehabilitation Effort' and a Asklepieon, both of which were based on cold war research on sensory deprivation and behavior modification. Politically active prisoners from across the U.S. were relocated to Marion Penitentiary including Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement. Sekou Odinga of the Black Liberation Army and Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera, who was recently not pardoned but granted clemency by Obama before leaving office. In 1973, the first control units were built at Marion Penitentiary. And in the words of the former warden, Ralph Arons, and this is a quote from the warden, "The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large." So this is a very open admission that Marion penitentiary was designed to suppress political opposition and political dissent. In 1983, the entire prison was locked down in response to the murder of two prison guards and this lockdown remained in effect for 23 years, making Marion the first de facto supermax prison. So we began with the control unit, then the control unit was basically extended to the entire prison and that made Marion Penitentiary the first supermax prison. But soon afterwards, supermax prisons were built to normalize that concept of having an entire wing or an entire prison organized around the premise and the practice of solitary confinement. There are now at least 57 prisons across the U.S. with supermax facilities. And nearly every jail detention center, even many alternative schools, have some sort of lockdown unit. This brings us to the question, "How can we end the practice of extreme isolation that has been normalized across the U.S.?" One of the major lawsuits that contested the use of solitary confinement in California is Madrid v. Gomez, which was a case that was decided in 1995. And in this case, Judge Thelton Henderson acknowledged, here's a quote "Conditions in the SHU may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience, particularly when endured for extended periods of time." However, he decided that, "They do not however violate exacting 8th amendment standards except for the specific population subgroups identified in this opinion," and those subgroups were people who are already mentally ill. And so Madrid v. Gomez while on one hand protecting prisoners who were already mentally ill from solitary confinement, set up this loop where prisoners who were not already mentally ill could be legally constitutionally subjected to a practice that was acknowledged to be likely to make them mentally ill or to result in what is known as SHU syndrome. And so, a partial protection in this case actually helps to normalize the practice of solitary confinement for those who are not already horribly affected by mental illness. Henderson continued that, "Segregated detention is not cruel and unusual punishment per se as long as the conditions of confinement are not foul, inhuman, or totally without penological justification. And this is in part how we have the very antiseptic, sort of clean, not dungeon-like but rather institutional spaces of solitary confinement in prisons, jails and detention centers today, that may not look like torture chambers the way you would imagine it, but that are built to basically withstand 8th Amendment challenges based on these sorts of partial protections that came out in cases like Madrid V. Gomez. So this leads me and others to think that legal reform alone is not sufficient to transform the practice of solitary confinement. And in California, hunger strikes were organized by prisoners in long-term solitary confinement in 2011 and 2013, culminating in the largest hunger strike in state history in 2013, when over 30,000 prisoners across California participated in refusing food on the very first day of the hunger strike. The hunger strikers had five core demands. One was to end group punishment for individual rule violations, another was to reform the gang validation policies that I spoke about earlier in which one could be labeled as a gang member on the basis of three bits of evidence and then put in solitary confinement indefinitely. A third demand was to comply with the recommendations of a national commission on long-term solitary confinement. Fourth was to provide adequate and healthy food, and fifth was to expand rehabilitation and recreation programs. So these are, in my view, very reasonable demands. They do not actually even demand the end of the practice of solitary confinement, only the compliance with federal recommendations on the practice. Many, many people joined the network of supporters of the hunger strikers in California prisons and the efforts of these protests resulted in substantial changes to the practice of solitary confinement in California. So at the same time that the hunger strikes were getting underway way, prisoners launched a class action lawsuit with lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights. And in 2015, they won a landmark settlement which abolished the practice of indefinite solitary confinement, and also radically revised the gang validation processes, and required that the housing status of each prisoner in solitary confinement in California be individually reviewed. This brought hundreds of prisoners in long-term solitary confinement back into general population. We've also seen encouraging reforms in New York State. So the New York Civil Liberties Union launched a campaign in 2012 called 'Boxed In', in which they engaged with the testimonies of people who had survived solitary confinement in New York state prisons, and also built a network of supporters on the outside. This resulted in a settlement in a class action lawsuit called People's v. Fisher in 2015, which now prohibits the imposition of solitary confinement on juveniles in New York State. It limits the solitary confinement of pregnant inmates, and it also provides alternatives for prisoners with cognitive impairments. So this is a step in the right direction, but as you can see, it's not fully what we might like to see in terms of a radical diminishment of solitary confinement, and it's nowhere near compliance with the Nelson Mandela rules that stipulate that 15 days should be the maximum that anyone is kept in solitary confinement. Another step in the right direction is Khalif's Law, which is a law introduced in New York State in 2016 that expedites the processing of people who choose to go to trial rather than to accept a plea bargain. And this law is inspired by Khalif Browder, who is a young man who spent two years in solitary confinement at Rikers Island awaiting trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. And Khalif had decided not to accept a plea bargain because he was not guilty of this crime, this is why he spent two years in jail awaiting trial. But as a result of the trauma that he experienced in prison and his long-term solitary confinement in prison, even after he was released and found not guilty, and the case was dismissed, a year later, Khalif Browder unfortunately took his life. And there is a television documentary series based on the Khalif Browder's story that is currently airing and this is the inspiration for Khalif's Law. It was also the inspiration for Barack Obama's move to ban solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons, a move that he made in 2016. So, in conclusion, I would argue that solitary confinement is a practice not just of prison management, but of torture, that has been normalized in the United States but that through the collaboration of activists on the inside and the outside is increasingly being reformed and revised across the United States. But we have to keep a watch on what happens in our prisons, jails, and detention centers. And so organizations like solitary watch who run a website of news from solitary and of voices from solitary are vital in the struggle to end torture in the United States.
