According to the authors of Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement, solitary confinement is a torturous practice that has no other goal than to control incarcerated people by stripping them of their humanity. It only produces additional trauma through sexual harassment and violent encounters with correctional officers, ultimately leading to long-term mental harm and suicide. It does not offer time and space for the critical reflection that incarcerated people often need, nor does it help correct the behavior that landed the person in solitary in the first place.
Ending Isolation is a compelling addition to the literature on the harms of the criminal legal system. It has the kind of information that one might find in a book written by an academic researcher, lawyer or journalist—history, statistics, medical, and legal analyses. What sets it apart, however, is that this context and analysis support the reader’s engagement with the searing emotional experiences of solitary confinement that are at the center of this book, rather than the other way around. The argument is supported through the details of what it is actually like to be isolated from human contact for days, months, or even years on end. Their goal is not to reform solitary condiment or to limit its use—they are advocating for the complete abolition of the practice. Solitary confinement, in their view, is cruel and unusual punishment and is therefore unconstitutional. After reading their account, it is hard not to agree with them.
Written by incarcerated journalist Christopher Blackwell and law professor Deborah Zalesne, with significant contributions from psychiatrist Terry Kupers and incarcerated journalist Kwaneta Harris, the book toggles between firsthand accounts of the devastating human impacts of solitary confinement (including the experiences of Blackwell and Harris, who spent an astonishing 8.5 years in solitary confinement at Lane Murray Prison in Texas) and the academic, legal, and medical perspectives of Zalesne, Harris, and others.
People who have been subjected to solitary confinement often describe it as being “buried alive.” The book has numerous descriptions of what life is like in a concrete room the size of a parking spot for 23 hours a day: you can hear every sound that others in solitary make but you can’t interact with them. You are constantly exposed to artificial light but never natural light, and your only time out of your cell is in an outdoor dog run not much bigger than the cell you are being confined to. You are never given enough food, and what you get is generally inedible. You don’t have access to a clock and have no sense of time. All these details make it clear why the walls “seem to close in with every breath.” As Blackwell describes it, “the cell somehow feels smaller and more enclosed and claustrophobic every time you re-enter it. You are in a tomb—a place where you’re breathing, yet have ceased to exist in the world.”
The advocacy organization Solitary Watch found that more than 122,000 people are locked up in solitary confinement on any given day in the United States. The practice originated in Philadelphia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, originally at the Maple Street Jail and ultimately at Eastern State Penitentiary. The idea was that a person who committed criminal acts could be reformed if they spent enough time alone with The Bible. They would pray, repent, and become peaceful, productive citizens. The warden or other prison personnel were supposed to visit the individual periodically to assess their progress. Very quickly, though, it became clear to everyone involved that solitary confinement did not work. Alexis de Tocqueville visited Eastern State Penitentiary in 1833 and observed that “the experiment…proved fatal for the majority of prisoners. It devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.”
Solitary largely disappeared from American prison and jails for the next century, only to be resuscitated as the age of mass incarceration began in the early 1980s. There was no new evidence to suggest that solitary confinement could be modified to produce the kind of rehabilitation that the Quakers originally hoped for.To the contrary, solitary only made sense in a country that had abandoned the ideal of rehabilitation and replaced it with the twin aims of containment and control. But solitary became a convenient way to deal with uncooperative or mentally unbalanced people in facilities that were bursting at the seams and had too few correctional officers, social workers, and mental health practitioners to help them. It also didn’t help that the mental institutions that once housed people with mental illnesses had been closed down in the previous few decades with nothing but prisons and jails to replace them.
By the 1980s, the federal government and states were building prisons that were almost exclusively based on solitary confinement, with no shared spaces for people to congregate or even eat together. And even facilities built primarily for congregate living have seen a dramatic increase in the number of segregation units over the past four decades. There was also a dramatic increase in the rates of solitary confinement for people who tested positive for COVID-19 during the pandemic.
While these units go by different official names in different jurisdictions—restrictive housing, special housing, intensive management, control unit programs, etc.—the people who get sent there invariably call it the same thing: the hole. In addition to explaining what it is like to exist in the hole (though to live seems like the wrong verb), Blackwell and colleagues explain the many situations that lead people to get sent there. And their list of reasons for why people they know got sent to the hole is infuriating in and of itself.
They also explain the differences between administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation. Ad-seg, as the name suggests, is done to protect an individual or make it easier for prison officials to run their facility. Disciplinary segregation is done to punish a person for breaking the rules of the prison, or in some cases, to punish them simply for existing. One point the authors make is that disciplinary segregation is not reserved for “the worst of the worst.” It is often used for relatively minor offenses like using foul language or even for reasons that are not entirely clear to the person being sent to solitary in the first place. People can be sent to the hole for refusing to work when sick or experiencing mental health episodes, while their claims of abuse by guards are being investigated, being affiliated or potentially affiliated with a gang, or simply based on unsubstantiated allegations from fellow incarcerated people. Prison journalists are particularly at risk for being sent to the hole when their stories threaten to expose poor conditions or wrongdoing in their facilities.
Academic readers and prisoners’ rights advocates wishing to use this book for research purposes will find there’s also much beyond the first-person narratives. In addition to a plethora of facts and statistics about solitary confinement that include footnotes with scholarly resources, the authors devote an entire chapter to documenting the physical and psychological harms of the practice, including self-harm and suicide. Even this chapter, however, is grounded in the stories and poetry of the people who experience these harms, and their families who are forced to endure the uncertainty of not knowing what is happening to their loved ones. The next chapter, which is on the cycle of mental illness and solitary confinement, treats that subject in much the same way. Various chapters also deal with racism, juveniles in solitary, the impact of heat and other environmental factors on people locked up in solitary confinement, and the long-term medical and mental health impacts of solitary confinement that remain even after victims return to general population or get released from incarceration.
In addition to more obvious things like PTSD, anxiety, depression, and hypervigilance, I was struck by the fact that people who are locked up in solitary for long periods need to readjust to very mundane things—like taking normal length strides while walking and engaging in human conversation. Kevin Light-Roth’s description of what it is like to see oneself in the mirror after long periods in isolation is exactly the kind of insight that makes this book so valuable.
The most disturbing chapter of the book, written with significant contributions from Harris and Kupers, documents the routine sexual abuse that women face in prisons , and restrictive housing in particular, as well as the risks that trans women face when they are housed in male prisons. She states that “sexual voyeurism, sexual intrusion, and sexual assault in women’s prisons are so rampant that they are experienced by essentially every person in here, almost on a daily basis.” Still, the story of what Lay Lay, one of her neighbors in solitary, had to do to get a guard to give her allergy medication after she was exposed to a trace of peanuts will leave readers in a state of shock and disbelief.
As the book nears its ultimate call to end solitary confinement, it takes a three-chapter detour into the realm of the law review article. Chapter 13, which bears the imprint of Zalesne, lays out the jurisprudence of solitary confinement. The authors explain the Eight Amendment concept of “cruel and unusual punishment” and the Fourteenth Amendment Right to Due Process. This chapter is crucial in that it provides the contours for advocacy against solitary confinement, which is the subject of the next chapter. Readers are introduced to the major organizations involved in this campaign, including Unlock the Box, the National Religious Campaign against Torture, the ACLU, Solitary Watch, and many others. They also describe the work being done by incarcerated people themselves in this domain,whether it’s organizing, engaging in prison journalism, or conducting hunger strikes. Lest the reader become demoralized, they describe some of the successes of this movement at the federal, state, and local jail system levels. This chapter includes two lessons that all non-incarcerated advocates and allies should heed when supporting the work of incarcerated activists or any other group for that matter—amplify impacted voices rather than speaking for them and be mindful of their trauma by finding points of similarity and humanity, rather than points of difference.
The section concludes with Chapter 15, a call for caution that is valuable here and in all aspects of criminal justice “reform”. Decision makers and law enforcement officials have a tendency to rebrand and reconfigure bad policies and practices without actually doing away with them. The authors worry that as the harms of solitary confinement become more publicized and public sentiment against the practice grows, superficial changes will be made to make it seem like they addressed the problem only to make little difference in the lives of the incarcerated. They ask readers to remain critical of claims of reform and to not assume that changes in the name of a unit actually mean a change in how it operates.
The strongest case against solitary condiment appears in one of the many call-out boxes that allow Blackwell to tell his story alongside the academic and legal analysis of Zalesne and Kupers and the experiences of Harris and other incarcerated people. He writes, somewhat innocuously, that “solitary confinement must end if we want people to leave prison healthy, productive, and ready to integrate into our neighborhoods.”
For people who might be less inclined to see the humanity in incarcerated people, or who think that people experiencing solitary confinement must deserve it, Blackwell reminds us that most people who are sent to solitary confinement do not spend the rest of their lives in prison—they re-enter the world damaged and less able to cope with the challenges they will face. This makes us all less safe. Putting aside the fact that solitary confinement is unconstitutional and a form of torture, it’s clear we will all be better off when the practice no longer exists.
