Hellhole: Solitary Confinement as Torture

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.

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 fiancee 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
reestablish. 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 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. 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 naive.

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 Guantanamo 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."