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http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/what-solitary-confinement-does-to-the-brain/
In the summer of 2007, King spent 75 days in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) of Fishkill Correctional Facility, a 19th-century asylum-turned-prison in Dutchess County in upstate New York. ‘Some rat told a correctional officer I was selling weed,’ he recalls. ‘So they gave me a Tier 3 ticket [a disciplinary hearing for violating prison rules], and 75 days in the Box.’ He found himself inside a 7ft x 10ft concrete cell with a small bed and toilet. It had a solid metal door with a small window made of hard plastic, out of which he could see a catwalk. A few times a day he saw correctional officers walking past, and once a day, a nurse dispensing medication.
Every morning, for an hour’s recreation, a door at the back opened out on to a ‘recreation cage’: a slightly bigger Box with a tiny, barred window. King wasn’t enamoured of the view: ‘A highway, some grass and trees, and sea gulls flyin’, shittin’ all over the place, eatin’ garbage that other inmates threw out.’ He had been in the Box a couple of times before, but these 75 days were the longest he’d ever been stuck there. After a few days, he found himself double-bunked – penned in with another inmate.
In the fall of 1982, the forensic psychiatrist Stuart Grassian visited Walpole State Penitentiary, Massachusetts’s only maximum-security prison at the time. He went there at the behest of a legal aid attorney, who wanted him to evaluate the mental health of the inmates in the prison’s segregation unit. He spoke to 14 young men who’d been in isolation for several months, each in a 6ft x 9ft cell with a barred inside gate, and a steel door with a voice box and a dirt-stippled glass panel the width of his face. Grassian expected to hear fantastically exaggerated claims from prisoners looking to dupe their way out of the unit, but each vociferously denied that anything was the matter. ‘Solitary doesn’t bother me,’ one told him. ‘Some of the guys can’t take it, I can,’ said another. With close questioning, Grassian wrote later in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the second prisoner ‘came to describe panic, fears of suffocation, and paranoid distortions while he had been in isolation’, while the first had recently slashed his wrists because he ‘figured it was the only way to get out of here’.
They suffered a range of symptoms: stupor, delirium, hallucination, and a loss of ‘perceptual constancy’ – the ability to recognise the sameness of things when viewed from different distances and angles. Many had painfully sharpened senses. One lived in dread of prisoners on the tier above turning on the faucet, sending water clinking and whooshing down the pipes. ‘It’s too loud, gets on your nerves. I can’t stand it – I start to holler,’ he told Gassian. ‘Are they doing it on purpose?’
Half of them hallucinated constantly. They heard whispers and muttered sounds, which took on menacing meanings: prison guards conferring about amputating a prisoner’s leg, someone getting beaten up with sticks. One prisoner – the disconsolate historian of Sartre’s Nausea brought to life – was haunted by the inconstancy of objects. ‘Melting, everything in the cell starts moving,’ he told Grassian. ‘Everything gets darker, you feel you are losing your vision.’ Another had Alice in Wonderland-like visions, featuring pancakes of diminishing sizes delivered to his gate. Four had extended bouts of amnesia. They said they felt narcotised, and couldn’t concentrate on anything.
‘These people were very sick,’ recalls Grassian. He thought it resembled anoxic brain injury – the result of an oxygen-starved brain – or delirium tremens, suffered by dipsomaniacs in the throes of alcohol withdrawal. But the symptoms also recalled a curious set of Cold War-era experiments that Grassian had read about years before.
Supermaxes embody a transition in prison policy over the past 30 years, from rehabilitation to a punitive ideology that emphasises stricter regulations, harsher punishment, and tougher sentences. They are carceral citadels that recall army bases with their remote locations and soaring electrified perimeter fences, and they star in a kind of security theatre intended to make the public feel safer. Inside, cells are typically laid out in narrow rows radiating from a central tower. From these eyries, correctional officers control the doors, lights, and temperatures of every unit. Prisoners spend 22.5 hours a day in 8ft x 10ft windowless isolation units, with 1.5 hours’ recess by themselves in a small concrete pen. Verbal communication takes place over an intercom system, and moments of contact are fleeting and often brutal: prisoners are put in security restraints or subjected to ‘cell extractions’, forced out of their cells by officers in riot gear and shock shields, armed with tasers and pepper spray.
In the summer of 2007, King spent 75 days in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) of Fishkill Correctional Facility, a 19th-century asylum-turned-prison in Dutchess County in upstate New York. ‘Some rat told a correctional officer I was selling weed,’ he recalls. ‘So they gave me a Tier 3 ticket [a disciplinary hearing for violating prison rules], and 75 days in the Box.’ He found himself inside a 7ft x 10ft concrete cell with a small bed and toilet. It had a solid metal door with a small window made of hard plastic, out of which he could see a catwalk. A few times a day he saw correctional officers walking past, and once a day, a nurse dispensing medication.
Every morning, for an hour’s recreation, a door at the back opened out on to a ‘recreation cage’: a slightly bigger Box with a tiny, barred window. King wasn’t enamoured of the view: ‘A highway, some grass and trees, and sea gulls flyin’, shittin’ all over the place, eatin’ garbage that other inmates threw out.’ He had been in the Box a couple of times before, but these 75 days were the longest he’d ever been stuck there. After a few days, he found himself double-bunked – penned in with another inmate.
In the fall of 1982, the forensic psychiatrist Stuart Grassian visited Walpole State Penitentiary, Massachusetts’s only maximum-security prison at the time. He went there at the behest of a legal aid attorney, who wanted him to evaluate the mental health of the inmates in the prison’s segregation unit. He spoke to 14 young men who’d been in isolation for several months, each in a 6ft x 9ft cell with a barred inside gate, and a steel door with a voice box and a dirt-stippled glass panel the width of his face. Grassian expected to hear fantastically exaggerated claims from prisoners looking to dupe their way out of the unit, but each vociferously denied that anything was the matter. ‘Solitary doesn’t bother me,’ one told him. ‘Some of the guys can’t take it, I can,’ said another. With close questioning, Grassian wrote later in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the second prisoner ‘came to describe panic, fears of suffocation, and paranoid distortions while he had been in isolation’, while the first had recently slashed his wrists because he ‘figured it was the only way to get out of here’.
They suffered a range of symptoms: stupor, delirium, hallucination, and a loss of ‘perceptual constancy’ – the ability to recognise the sameness of things when viewed from different distances and angles. Many had painfully sharpened senses. One lived in dread of prisoners on the tier above turning on the faucet, sending water clinking and whooshing down the pipes. ‘It’s too loud, gets on your nerves. I can’t stand it – I start to holler,’ he told Gassian. ‘Are they doing it on purpose?’
Half of them hallucinated constantly. They heard whispers and muttered sounds, which took on menacing meanings: prison guards conferring about amputating a prisoner’s leg, someone getting beaten up with sticks. One prisoner – the disconsolate historian of Sartre’s Nausea brought to life – was haunted by the inconstancy of objects. ‘Melting, everything in the cell starts moving,’ he told Grassian. ‘Everything gets darker, you feel you are losing your vision.’ Another had Alice in Wonderland-like visions, featuring pancakes of diminishing sizes delivered to his gate. Four had extended bouts of amnesia. They said they felt narcotised, and couldn’t concentrate on anything.
‘These people were very sick,’ recalls Grassian. He thought it resembled anoxic brain injury – the result of an oxygen-starved brain – or delirium tremens, suffered by dipsomaniacs in the throes of alcohol withdrawal. But the symptoms also recalled a curious set of Cold War-era experiments that Grassian had read about years before.
Supermaxes embody a transition in prison policy over the past 30 years, from rehabilitation to a punitive ideology that emphasises stricter regulations, harsher punishment, and tougher sentences. They are carceral citadels that recall army bases with their remote locations and soaring electrified perimeter fences, and they star in a kind of security theatre intended to make the public feel safer. Inside, cells are typically laid out in narrow rows radiating from a central tower. From these eyries, correctional officers control the doors, lights, and temperatures of every unit. Prisoners spend 22.5 hours a day in 8ft x 10ft windowless isolation units, with 1.5 hours’ recess by themselves in a small concrete pen. Verbal communication takes place over an intercom system, and moments of contact are fleeting and often brutal: prisoners are put in security restraints or subjected to ‘cell extractions’, forced out of their cells by officers in riot gear and shock shields, armed with tasers and pepper spray.
