Hell Is a Very Small Place: Five Unforgettable Stories from Solitary Confinement.

Top Posts from "Voices from Solitary," the Series That Reveals the Lived Experience of Prison Isolation

Years ago, when we were down in Louisiana working on a story about the notorious plantation prison called Angola, a man who had served nearly 20 years shared with us what he thought to be a common misconception about prisons. He knew that most people looked at the wall around the perimeter of a prison, and believed its purpose was to keep the incarcerated from escaping. But the wall “isn’t there to keep prisoners in,” he said. “It’s to keep the rest of you out.”

This has nowhere been more true than in solitary confinement units, the “prisons within prisons” that are kept strictly off limits to the public and the press, where tens of thousands of people have suffered in silence for years or even decades. That silence has been broken only by individuals with the fortitude to reach out—and to risk retaliation from prison staff—in order to share their stories of life in solitary.

Over the last eight years, we have been privileged to receive more and more of these stories—most of them sent to us by handwritten letter—and to develop relationships with hundreds of people in solitary confinement. Their writing has informed our reporting, and has been published on our site in the series we call “Voices from Solitary.” Last year, some of them were compiled in the first anthology of writing from solitary, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. Today, we feature the five stories that you have chosen as the most compelling—the ones most read, most shared, and most commented upon.

The work we do—shining a light on one of the darkest corners of the U.S. criminal justice system, and connecting with the people who experience it first-hand—is made possible only through the support of our readers. If you believe this work is important, we hope you will consider making a gift to Solitary Watch this year—perhaps tomorrow, on #GivingTuesday. Through December 31st, every donation you make up to $1,000 will be doubled through the News Match program, funded by the Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. So please read these stories, share them—and donate what you can to ensure that they keep coming across the prison walls.

➽ Thomas Silverstein has been held in solitary confinement under a “no human contact” order for more than three decades. He is currently at ADX Florence, the federal government’s notorious supermax prison in the mountains of Colorado. Earlier, he was housed at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was placed in a windowless underground cell measuring 6 x 7 feet and denied any possessions, including reading materials or clothing other than underwear. The following comes from a lengthy declaration written for a 2011 federal lawsuit, in which Silverstein argued that his record of prison violence more than 20 years earlier did not entitle the state to subject him to torture. The suit was dismissed by the court.

The cell was so small that I could stand in one place and touch both walls simultaneously. The ceiling was so low that I could reach up and touch the hot light fixture. My bed took up the length of the cell, and there was no other furniture at all…The walls were solid steel and painted all white…Shortly after I arrived, the prison staff began construction, adding more bars and other security measures to the cell while I was within it…It is hard to describe the horror I experienced during this construction process. As they built new walls around me it felt like I was being buried alive…Due to the unchanging bright artificial lights and not having a wristwatch or clock, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Frequently, I would fall asleep and when I woke up I would not know if I had slept for five minutes or five hours, and would have no idea of what day or time of day it was…I now know that I was housed there for about four years, but I would have believed it was a decade if that is what I was told. It seemed eternal and endless and immeasurable.

➽ Writing from Texas Death Row, where he has been held in solitary confinement for more than 12 years, Thomas Bartlett Whitaker describes the impact of living in isolation while awaiting execution. The title of his piece, The War of All Against All comes from the description that 17th-Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave to human existence in a state of nature. The founder of a blog for prison writing and winner of several awards for his own writing from prison, Whitaker also contributed a (different) essay to Hell Is a Very Small Place.

It’s not always easy to see how this place creeps up on you…It twists you up in contradictions. I have to stalk myself almost constantly, to make sure that I don’t say or do anything dishonorable. I was messed up when I came here, and in many ways I have far more self-control. But at the same time, I feel frayed, like I’ve been living in the face of this sandstorm for 11 years, and it’s worn my soul down to a pathetic little nub. They don’t really kill you when they give you a date. You are pretty much already dead by that point…This place ruins people. Some it makes insane. Some, like me, it forces to go so deep that they aren’t ever able to crawl back out again. Some people get so hard that discipline simply can’t ever imprint on them again…The irony is that they built these places to house a theoretical super-predator that didn’t really exist at the time, and ended up actually building that very individual…[The men on death row] have seen through that to the truth, that it’s just one group applying power over another, and this just makes them laugh. Once you truly see the world as bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all] you don’t ever really come back from that.

➤ Click here to read the full article

Source: Solitary Watch, November 27, 2017

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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