On May 11, 2015, three weeks before his tragic death, Kalief Browder submitted a short essay on solitary confinement for an English class at Bronx Community College.
Below is his paper unedited, in full.
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Kalief Browder
English 11
Professor Jillian Hess
May 11, 2015
A Closer Look at Solitary Confinement in the United States
Is solitary confinement a good helpful way to rehabilitate inmates or is solitary confinement only making matters worse? Solitary confinement is a practice that prison officials use in order to impose punishment on inmates who break the prison or jail rules. It is when an inmate is placed and confined in a cell by himself without human contact for a specific amount of days or sometimes years to reflect on what they did to break the prison or jail rules and hopefully change their behavior. When an inmate is placed in solitary confinement books, magazines, phone usage, visits and outdoor recreation are limited and depending on what jail or prison it is some of these things are prohibited to the inmates. The solitary confinement practice is often in conflict with the eighth amendment. Instead of solitary confinement rehabilitating inmates there is evidence of it actually causing severe mental problems for inmates and in the long run leaving the mental disorders for their families to deal with.
In the United States solitary confinement was said to have started as an experiment in the 19th century for the purpose of punishing misbehaving inmates and also rehabilitating them. The way solitary confinement is believed to be helpful is that the time spent alone in such circumstances is a way for inmates to reflect on the misbehaviors they conducted in the jail or prison and change their behavior. According to Story “The first institution in the US to experiment with isolation was the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, built at the end of the 18th century by members of the Quaker Church with the objective not just of punishing criminals but also of rehabilitating them. The model was quickly adopted by the original American penitentiaries, first in Philadelphia at Eastern State and then in Auburn, New York at the beginning of the 19th century” (357). Without solitary confinement being fully tested as in the health defects of it, the model soon began to spread and other penitentiaries started following the tradition. However, many health defects were beginning to present themselves within inmates who have been subjected to solitary confinement. According to Story “As early as the 1830s, reports had started to materialize about the various mental disorders isolated prisoners were exhibiting. These included hallucinations, dementia, and monomania (357). By the late 1800’s solitary confinement began to be frowned upon because of the adverse mental health issues it continued to cause to inmates and by the early 1900’s it was abolished.
Even with the abolishment of solitary confinement and the developments of the mental health risk it imposes on inmates the tradition of it did not cease for long, but again continued and began to spread across the United States. Also according to Story “Beginning in the 1960s and proliferating most systematically over the last 30 years, we have seen a revival of the practice of solitary confinement in the United States as an increasingly long-term and wide-reaching practice. Since the early 1980s, the use of isolation has come to be one of the fastest-growing conditions of detention, even exceeding the expansion of the US prison system in general over the same period” (357). The rise in the use of solitary confinement is believed to be behind the cause of prison violence. Prison violence is described as multiple factors such as: fights, weapon usage, gang violence, sexual assaults, drugs, riots and other heinous acts. According to Silberman “Routine violence among inmates occurs as a result of disputes over drugs, sex, or gambling debts. Prison gangs are often involved due to competition over the control of the distribution of illegal drugs in prison. Racial or ethnic tension often leads to gang violence, including sexual assault and murder” (1). So due to these different types of prison violence that goes on, a large debate about whether solitary confinement should be abolished or at least limited have been being discussed and if abolished how would they deal with the consistent prison violence?
Evidently in every jail or prison there are always a group or groups of inmates who are and tend to cause severe harm to other inmates and correction officers so what other alternatives do they have is in question. As noted in Solitary Confinement, “Strict solitary keeps highly dangerous inmates in conditions where they’re less able to harm prison staff or other inmates or induce other prisoners to commit violent acts” (Katel 768). There are still a great number of inmates in solitary confinement who aren’t considered threats but sent there for punishment for something he or she may have done regardless of how petty it was. A prison official named Atherton and noted in Solitary Confinement: “…Supermaxes in many states have expanded beyond their intended purpose, making what should be, in his view, a standard prison-management tool a matter of controversy.” A lot of wardens were locking guys up who were headaches but manageable under normal circumstances, “he says. “That’s a huge error” (Katel 768).
As a result many inmates undergo many unnecessary mental health problems that are left up to them and their family members to deal with and fix. Many inmates who go through these problems of being in solitary confinement are now stuck with mental health issues and some don’t even have health insurance to even tend to their care. There are a lot of mental issues within inmates and ex-inmates that stem from solitary confinement as noted by Cockrell “… physical symptoms are chest pains, weight loss, diarrhea, dizziness, and fainting.” There are many psychological symptoms: decreased ability to concentrate, confusion, memory loss, visual as well as auditory hallucinations, paranoia, overt psychosis, violent fantasies, anxiety, depression in huge numbers, lethargy, and trouble sleeping.” Attempts to commit suicide are not uncommon (213).
These mental health issues often send ex-inmates right back to prison because of misbehaviors that stem from their stay in solitary confinement. These ongoing issues are breaking and tarring up families because their family members are left to pick up the shattered pieces of the ex-inmate with severe mental health issues and some of the ex-inmate have neither family members or health insurance to care for them leaving it a stronger possibility to end up back in prison due mental misbehaviors that stem from solitary confinement. Due to many rising issues going on with solitary confinement some states have already started revising how their prisons use of solitary confinement is to be used; some have limited; some have cut down on how many inmates are sent there; some have closed down new solitary confinement buildings and some have abolished having teens in solitary confinement. In July, 2013 in California prisons, inmates went on a hunger strike to try to abolish solitary confinement. According to Story “That year, about 12 000 prisoners across more than a dozen institutions had used one of the last powers available to them in their austere conditions — the power to stop eating — to draw public attention to the problem of prison isolation” (355). For a large number of inmates to starve themselves to raise attention to the issue of solitary confinement speaks volumes of the mental tortures it consist of.
Furthermore many people agree that it violates the eighth amendment because many deem solitary confinement cruel and unusual punishment. In an inmate’s brief detailed account of solitary confinement in the article Solitary Confinement is: “Stripped naked in a small prison cell with nothing except a toilet; forced to go to sleep on a concrete floor or slab; denied any human contact; fed nothing but ‘nutri-loaf;’ and given just a modicum of toilet paper -four squares- only a few times (Katel 770). This is just one of millions experience in solitary confinement although depending on what jail, prison or state you’re in the punishment you are subjugated to while in solitary confinement varies. In most cases of solitary confinement also including the experience of inmate that was just explained are deemed as cruel and usual punishment. The eighth amendment is supposed to protect people in the United States against cruel and unusual punishment but when it comes to the solitary confinement issue it is often pushed under the rug for one reason or another. Sometimes inmates come to jail with already mental health issues that varies and are subjugated to solitary confinement which makes their matters worst in which they should already be under special care depending on how bad their mental health is. According to Hafemeister and George “Housing inmates with a mental disorder in prolonged supermax solitary confinement deprives them of a minimal life necessity because this setting poses a significant risk to their basic level of mental health, a need “as essential to human existence as other basic physical demands, “and thereby meets the objective element required for an Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment claim” (2).
In conclusion solitary confinement should be looked at as a whole around the United States and even though changes toward the solitary confinement system have begun in some states, more needs to be done and addressed around the country. In a lot of jails and prisons there are a lot of living circumstances and practices that go on within that are not addressed that people need to shed light on like solitary confinement for example. Maybe another form of punishment or segregation should be implemented to deal with inmates who break jail rules as opposed to inmates who cause severe harm to other inmates and correction officers because the mental health risk it poses are too great.
Bibliography
Cockrell, John F. “Solitary Confinement: The Law Today And The Way Forward.” Law & Psychology Review 37.(2013): 211–227. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
HAFEMEISTER, THOMAS L., and JEFF GEORGE. “The Ninth Circle Of Hell: An Eighth Amendment Analysis Of Imposing Prolonged Supermax Solitary Confinement On Inmates With A Mental Illness.” Denver University Law Review 90.1 (2012): 1–54. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
Katel, Peter. “Solitary Confinement.” CQ Researcher 14 Sept. 2012: 765–88. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
Silberman, Matthew. “Prisons, Violence.” Encyclopedia of Social Problems. Ed. Vincent N. Parrillo. Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2008. 720. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 17 Mar. 2015
Story, B. “Alone Inside: Solitary Confinement And The Ontology Of The Individual In Modern Life.” Geographica Helvetica 69.5 (2014): 355–364. Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Mar. 2015.
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