Ella Baker Center Blog

In “Hellhole,” published in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker, Atul Gawande condemns the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons as a form of torture. If solitary confinement is torturous to adults, imagine the impact of prolonged isolation on young people whose brains are still developing.

A 2004 lawsuit against California’s youth prison system revealed that young people in state custody who violated institutional rules were being held 20- to 23-hours per day in solitary confinement for weeks and months on end. Four years later, solitary confinement—known as SMP or Special Management Program by corrections officials—remains a routine practice of California’s Division of Juvenile Justice.

The effects of solitary confinement, as Atul Gawande documents, are deeply troubling:

• Experience confirms that solitary confinement is torture. “A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam [...] reported that [the aviators] found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.”
• Solitary confinement impairs normal functioning of the brain. Electroencephalography (EEG) studies have shown “diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement.” One of these studies concluded: “Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.”
• The experience of prolonged isolation often leaves people “unfit for social interaction.” A study of one hundred people in isolation at California’s Pelican Bay supermax revealed that many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind,” as they fall into an essentially catatonic state. Ninety percent of those studied exhibited “difficulties with ‘irrational anger’” compared to just three percent of prisoners from general population.
• Solitary confinement raises serious mental health concerns. A Boston psychiatrist interviewed two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement and found that “about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations.”

Gawande says prison officials defend solitary confinement as a “necessary evil” to reduce violence and maintain order inside correctional institutions. But this theory belies the facts. “The most careful inquiry” into the effects of solitary confinement on prison violence and disorder found that use of solitary confinement had no impact on inmate-on-inmate violence and no logical correlation with inmate-on-staff violence.

With twenty-five thousand incarcerated people isolated in supermax prisons and as many as eighty thousand detained in restrictive segregation units, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons is widespread. A form of solitary confinement is also a fixture of the disciplinary regime at California’s six state juvenile facilities.

Under the DJJ’s Special Management Program (SMP), youth in California are locked in isolation up to 21 hours a day. These young people are limited to a single one-hour visit per week with family from behind a glass window—they are barred from any physical contact with their loved ones. According to Books Not Bars’ DJJ Report Cards, the average length of stay for youth placed in SMP was 42 days in 2004; in 2007, that average rose to 65 days.

Administrative lockdowns—when an entire unit or youth prison is shut down—also occur regularly. In 2007, Stark and Preston together imposed five administrative lockdowns, lasting a total of 30 days. Under an administrative lockdown, youth are forced to remain in their cells and cannot attend classes or programming, even if they were not involved in the offending incident.

Some states are beginning to recognize that what is harmful cannot heal. The state of Missouri, which has piloted a successful model of regionalized, rehabilitative care for young people in trouble, places youth in isolation rarely and never for more than a few hours. The problem with solitary, the director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services told the New York Times last week, “is that a young person doesn’t learn how to avoid that aggressive behavior and it will get worse.” Instead of spending time in isolation, young people in Missouri are trained in how to de-escalate conflicts.

All young people—and all adults for that matter—require opportunities for social interaction and self-expression. Disciplinary programs ought to attend to people’s needs in order to prevent misbehavior and facilitate positive growth.