The noise in solitary confinement is ceaseless. You’re startled awake throughout the night by the repetitive slam of heavy steel doors and the shrill jangle of guards’ keys hanging from their belts, by the sound of their walkie-talkies crackling through the vast empty space. Once you’re awake, the light that never sleeps takes over—the long fluorescent bulb mounted above you burns bright. You cover your head with a blanket trying to evade its encompassing glare. As soon as you drift off, a guard kicks your door and tells you to show yourself, so they know you’re alive. When you do sleep, the garbled screams of your neighbors invade your dreams.
The noise in solitary confinement is ceaseless.
During the day, the noise distracts you. You find yourself staring at an open book—reading the same sentence again and again, listening to fists beating discordant rhythms against the hard steel doors. Incomprehensible announcements squawk from the loud speakers. Someone’s shoes thud on the concrete floor of the cell above yours, as the prisoner paces back and forth. Someone else is finding comfort in kicking their metal sink next door. There is a steady asthmatic gasp from the ancient, dust-choked ventilation system. Conversations and arguments hollered from one cell to another—the echo bouncing from wall to wall—force their way into your mind and shut down your thoughts. And beneath it all, the bedrock of this cacophony is made of the rants and cries of humans forced to live inside their minds, sliding into a place with no doors, into deep dark holes within themselves.
You drink water to fend off the hunger inflicted by small, cold meals that never satisfy. You could complain, but that only leads to trouble. You mindlessly pace, sometimes counting the steps—one, two, three . . . turn, one, two, three . . . turn—to expel anxious energy. You never see a clock. Time is for another world. The window slit at the back of your cell is painted over or simply out of reach from the view of your eyes, even on the tips of your toes. You crave the sun and its warmth. There is only night and day, and both have grown so long it no longer seems a single cycle could contain them.
Your time out of the cold cell could come long before breakfast, long after dinner, or at any point between. Guards arrive to strip you of your clothes and dignity; after kneeling on the floor, you are tightly cuffed and attached to a dog leash. Two guards grab you tightly as the cuffs cut into your wrists and you are led down the hall to the yard.
The yard isn’t a yard and there is no grass.
But the yard isn’t a yard and there is no grass. It’s a dog run, narrow with high concrete walls. There is no roof. You will not see trees or people. Just an abbreviated segment of sky. You are unlikely to see the sun, but you will be exposed to whatever the day’s elements happen to be—rain, heat, snow, hail. The space has little to offer aside from a chin-up bar and a payphone bolted to the wall. The phone might work—often, it doesn’t. Instead of hearing a loved one’s voice when you place the receiver next to your ear you hear the intractable silence of a dead line.
The guards come back to collect you within an hour, maybe. They could be early, depriving you of the mere hour you’re due. Or maybe they will be gone for hours, leaving you in the rain, or cold, or heat, while they were gone because of some intervening event—a use of force incident where another prisoner was being abused, or a football game on the break room television. You have no way of knowing.
When the guards do return, they walk you back to your concrete box on a leash, where nothing has changed. You look around at the thin plastic pad that serves as a mattress, the few sheets of paper on your concrete desk, a couple of tattered books, the obscured window, and the same inescapable light that glares down upon your face. 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 next day is exactly the same, over and over, until some distant group of people decides you have had enough.
This grinding monotony of idleness, hunger, uncertainty, and madness is the horrifying everyday reality for close to 50,000 people in American prisons, including more than 600 people here in Washington State. For many, this has been their existence for years, even decades. But these barbaric conditions lead to harm, fear, and anger that can last a lifetime. Solitary confinement must end if we want people to leave prison healthy, productive, and ready to reintegrate into our neighborhoods.
Solitary confinement is not a solution to anything and certainly doesn’t make us safer.
Solitary confinement is not a solution to anything and certainly doesn’t make us safer. Studies have shown solitary doesn’t decrease violence; it increases it. It doesn’t prevent self-harm or suicide; it exacerbates it. Solitary doesn’t save money; it costs three times more than standard incarceration. It doesn’t make guards safer; it makes them more prone to mental and physical health issues. And solitary doesn’t teach people a lesson or prepare them for release; it makes them angry, isolated, and more likely to be re-incarcerated.
Despite these findings, prisons across the country continue to protect this system of violence, keeping this torturous tool at their disposal to abuse and control prisoners. The one thing solitary does is give prison systems a form of control that incarcerated people fear most—arbitrary in its application, devastating in its consequences. And to preserve this power, prisons claim they’re dedicated to reform while whispering fear into the ears of politicians and silently filling their ranks with guards rather than funding the mental health and programming needed to make real change.
We must reconstruct a prison system that rehabilitates our fellow citizens, as opposed to further harming them.
If hurt people hurt people, we must reconstruct a prison system that rehabilitates our fellow citizens, as opposed to further harming them. Here in Washington State, the Department of Corrections claims to be “working together to keep communities safer,” but solitary doesn’t make anyone safer. The agency should stop just supporting solitary reform in spirit, and support it in actual practice by ending a system they know is causing irreparable damage to hundreds of lives and ultimately putting our communities at risk.
, C. Blackwell, K. Light-Roth, July 28, 2023
