solitary confinement

In 1829 Eastern State prison in Pennsylvania conducted an experiment. They built an underground correctional facility that denied inmates any knowledge of the outside world. Inmates were deprived of sunlight; they couldn’t write or receive letters from loved ones; they couldn’t have visitors, or receive news of worldly events (and when taken out of their cells, they had to be hooded so as to prevent them from even seeing a natural living object). The idea was a puritanical one. You could reform the corrupted by denying them contact with the corrupting forces of society. Everyone, according to Quaker theology, has the “inner light of God” within them, so by replacing social interaction with solitary reflection, an individual might become reacquainted with ‘natural’ concepts of right and wrong and thereby rehabilitate himself.

Needless to say, the experiment failed. When Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, he declared the psychological effects on the inmates to be “cruel and wrong”. He described the inmate in solitary confinement as “a man buried alive—dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair”. Moreover, studies showed the inmates to be less able to reintegrate themselves into society upon their releases, and, as expected, recidivism increased. Finally, in 1913, the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement was abandoned as a failure.

Since then, numerous studies have shown a direct link between solitary confinement and mental illness—not to mention physical disease and death. As put by psychologist Angie Hougas: The complied research from … models and other studies revealed there are symptoms that can be attributed to conditions of confinement. Some of these symptoms are: perceptual distortions, illusions, vivid fantasies (sometimes along with vivid hallucinations) and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli. Along with these, some people developed observable syndromes which include cognitive impairment, massive free-floating anxiety, extreme motor restlessness, emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies (sometimes along with fearful hallucinations) and in some cases, delirium like conditions. EEG's confirmed the same abnormalities typical of stupor and delirium. It was also seen that there were organic changes in the brain similar to stupor and delirium.

Yet, despite the problems and despite any evidence of ameliorating effects, the current American penal system not only refuses to abandon solitary confinement as a tool for modifying inmate behavior, the practice is now increasing. Currently, more than 20,000 prisoners are kept in SuperMax and SHU prisons, where the use of solitary confinement is widespread. The idea for these prisons began in 1983 when a federal prison in Marion, Illinois ordered a permanent ‘lockdown’ after inmates killed two guards. The concept caught on, and the first SuperMax prison was opened two years later in Florence, Colorado. Today, more than 38 states have similar institutions.

The trend is disturbing, but not in the least surprising. Solitary confinement is, after all, an American idea. It originated here and continues to flourish here in spite of almost unanimous disapproval by the rest of the world. Not even the rationale for it has changed much since the 1800s. While no longer appealing to puritanical doctrine directly, its advocates continue to defend its use as a means of modifying degenerate behavior. Correction officials say they need it as an incentive for good conduct and to maintain order within the system, even while studies point to an increased propensity for violence in prisons where the procedure is commonplace.

One might be tempted to see in such an obdurate refusal to give up a failed practice a uniquely American pathology. The Quakers, though, like the Calvinists and other puritan religious groups that were prominent in early America, were influenced in large part by European Catholic tradition, and the solitary reflection advocated by puritanical thought isn’t at all unsimilar to that practiced in Catholic monasteries. Still, Europeans didn’t come up with the idea of solitary confinement, nor have they continued its practice the way we have in America. So maybe there is something about the American psyche that makes our prison system so hopelessly irrational.

We continue to build new SuperMax and SHU prisons even though most of the inmates in those prisons have release dates, and they’re going to come out a lot worse than when they came in, thanks to our blind respect for failed policy. Do we really want to propagate the number of insane felons let out in the streets or is there some method to our madness?

America is a country of loners (it isn’t just me). We prize individualism above all other virtues. Self reliance, individual liberty, personal achievement. These are the values we live by. Our heroes are rugged frontiersman and solitary, misunderstood supermen. We prefer playing computer games to talking with friends, driving our private automobiles to using public transportation, and watching television to getting to know our neighbors. We’re not a social country. And in some respects, that’s alright. The individualism championed by Thoreau and those like him is admirable. It leads to a distrust of authority, a support of the underdog, self-sufficiency, and enhanced creativity, to name but a few of its attributes. But it also has a dark side, and it’s the dark side of individualism that is frequently encountered in American society and embodied by our prison system.

In many ways, the American prison system is a microcosm for American society in general. In spite of whatever rationalizations are put forward by the higher-ups, the real motivation behind any governmental action is always power and control. This is true in prisons, and it’s true whenever our leaders wage war or raise taxes or hand out parking citations. Our government doesn’t make decisions to protect the social welfare but to preserve the interests of the men and women who own the country—namely, the people who run the corporations.

It’s interesting to note that only five years after opening, Easter State Penitentiary was investigated by the state on charges of prisoner abuse and embezzlement. Testimony indicated that inmates were often let out of their cells to do administrative duties for the staff and to do work that made money for the guards, and money laundering was widespread. The hypocrisy was revealed: the prison wasn’t being run as a sincere effort to reform criminals; it was being run to benefit the people who owned and made money from the prison.

In this light, solitary confinement makes a lot of sense. If you’re making money exploiting people it pays to not only keep those people from communicating to each other and with the outside world but to silence them altogether. In Turkey several years back, the government implemented a policy of modeling its own prison system on America’s SuperMax example. In defending the policy, officials (off the record, at least) didn’t make any duplicitous claims about reforming the inmates or cleaning up the community; they justified the new f-type prisons, as they were called, as providing a necessary secrecy to the officers. No doubt, this is why the practice of solitary confinement persists in America, too.

And if officials could get away with it, I’ve little doubt that they’d implement the practice on the country at large. In a way, our leaders have been promoting solitary confinement as the ideal lifestyle since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. This is what American individualism really amounts to, not a confirmation of the self as the subject and creator of one’s relationship to the world, but a veneration of private fantasy and separatism—the triumph of ego and desire over responsibility and awareness. In America, our heroes don’t represent the creative individuality of the artist or the lover, but the perverse individuality of the sociopath—a private omnipotence in which the self is held aloft and separated from the outside world. Americans don’t prize individualism, we prize secrecy. The reason our secrecy is so important is because hierarchy and consumer capitalism can’t exist without it. Secrecy is promoted as a catalyst for insanity, because only the insane can take seriously an economic and political system that pretends resources are infinite and some living things are more entitled than others. We exchange the complicated truth for simple insanity. And the truth is that the pie can’t continue to increase forever (the primary excuse for consumer capitalism) and the pie isn’t getting bigger for everybody, only for the rich (the very rich, I might add. According to the Federal Reserve Bulletin, since 1973 the net value of income has increased for the top 9% of Americans and decreased for the other 91%, in spite of a decline in worker benefits and an increase in the number of hours worked. And the gap has widened even more in the rest of the world). The truth is that consumer capitalism is built on exploitation, and we can’t let ourselves admit that our privileges are paid for at the expense of the Third World and other minorities. Exploitation is a double edged sword, too—it leads to lies and denials by the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The oppressors have to lie about their motives—claim that they’re helping the less fortunate, and the oppressed have to lie about being oppressed—deny the fact that they’ve come out as the losers in the game. So both sides collude in maintaining the delusion. They do so because neither side wants to give up the dream of private egoistic fulfillment. We want to believe we really can have it all.

What’s interesting about the effects of social isolation is the way they’re covered up. When inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, they don’t exaggerate their symptoms in an effort to get attention, they turn surprisingly evasive. They attempt to rationalize the effects away, or deny they’ve been adversely affected at all. This is in sharp contrast to the behavior inmates exhibit when suffering from so-called physical diseases. In those cases, the symptoms tend to be highly exaggerated or even made up, and great care is taken to secure drugs and other remedies to reduce the sufferer’s discomfort. Not so when it comes to the damaging effects inflicted on the mind.

For whatever reason, no one, not the victim or the perpetrator, wants to acknowledge insanity. We don’t want to challenge the apparitions in our own heads, and we don’t want to face up to the fact that our system of government is fundamentally irrational and psychotic, probably because facing up to that would mean admitting that possession doesn’t lead to fulfillment--that the self has limitations and that we can’t have everything we want, which means the system isn’t in service of the ever-consuming and insatiable individual but the other way around. Only if we buy into a false concept of individuality based on private accumulation and refuge is it possible to believe otherwise. On the other hand, if we can satisfy ourselves that egoism is essential to human nature (the true private self), then irrationality becomes the norm. That’s the big secret right there. It’s a secret we keep from each other, but especially from ourselves. If you believe the lie, it’s easier to perpetuate it. And once you begin lying, the lies have to pile up in defense. Before you know it, you can sell yourself on the idea that Native Americans are less entitled to live on the land than Europeans (who make better use of it), that Blacks are happier on slave plantations than on their own, that women are dumber than men because their brains are smaller, that Iraq is being invaded to promote democracy, that globalization is good for the Third World, that a corporation deserves all the rights of an individual but none of the restraints, that solitary confinement is necessary for the public good, or that consumer capitalism is sustainable. And to believe all that you have to believe that whatever happens to individuals in the public arena is somehow in their private best interests and that American individuality isn’t simply a myth designed to ensure control—a false concept that pushes people into private fantasy worlds to prevent them from knowing or admitting to knowing that their life is a lie. Put simply, you have to believe and live in an intensely solipsistic world that’s been detached from reality; you have to be insane.

And it’s the insanity that makes the practice of solitary confinement so horrific and damaging. As one inmate put it, “it’d be a lot more caring to be taken out to the desert and locked into a 5’ by 7’ tin cage and left to rot. At least then you’d know that you’re there to be punished.” Hate is something we understand; it’s human. Mechanical torture is something else entirely.

Mechanical torture is the unique specialty of modern government. In our modern prisons, computers have become the primary tools of operation: the cell doors open and close automatically, the food is delivered automatically, and human beings are needed only for the occasional emergency and to monitor and trouble-shoot the computers. It’s very efficient—efficient like a machine. And efficiency in America is another way of saying increased profit and consumption, and when profit rules, you need to preserve secrecy before anything else; you need the other to be just like you—automated and objectified, and thereby as much in service of your private desires as you are of his--like a fellow machine--a machine with no scruples and no natural connections or vulnerabilities--a completely private entity whose appetites can't possibly be in conflict with anyone else's because it isn't connected to anyone else--it's alone. In a private universe, you can’t be held accountable for your actions. You have license. And that’s what we mean by democratic freedom in America; we mean that you have license to act without consideration of the other, that you can have whatever you want and do whatever you want—in isolation and in secrecy.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/
http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/98-09%20FALL/solitary.html
http://northstargallery.com/ESP/easternstatehistory01.htm