SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

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I became aware of what real solitary confinement was when I was placed in solitary confinement in the summer and fall months in 1962 when I was a prison inmate at the Guelph Reformatory for adults in the Province of Ontario in Canada. 

I was sent to that facility to serve 15 months for giving shelter to someone being looked for by the police. Many years later, the federal government ordered that the records of my arrest, trial, sentence and imprisonment were to be destroyed which they were.
                                            

As soon as I arrived, I was made a trustee and as such, I was the clerk of the hospital in that reformatory. Months later, there was talk about a riot being considered. The Superintendent, Charles  Sanderson ordered me to go to the Captain’s office. Sanderson knew that I was fully aware of what was going in in his institution and asked me to talk the men out of going ahead with the riot. I think he thought that I knew who the planners of the riot would be. I had no idea who they would be. He ordered the guards to let me walk around the large building and in the large grassy yard outside the building.That was probably the first time when guards opened all the gates of any correctional institution for an inmate without asking why he wanted to go to the next part of the building.  I talked to many inmates and even those who just arrived. I talked about the weather and other interesting subjects but nothing about the proposed riot. There were guards on the roof of the building looking at me while I was talking to a great many of  my fellow inmates in the yard. Obviously, there was nothing the Superintendent could conclude from my walks about the building and the huge grassy yard.

Two days later, 400 men in one of the two dining rooms rioted. Fortunately, I was not in that dining room. One stupid prisoner in the dining room I was in yelled, “”LET’S DO IT!”  He was quickly dragged out of the dining room by the guards.

The 400 men in the  rioting dining room   were sent to the concrete yard that is enclosed by some of the buildings. We on thr other hand were sent to  huge cell where we were to remain for the night. We were each given sandwiches and a blanket and pillow  for the night.

That evening, the head of security was standing at the locked gate. I said to him that everything was cool and if he could bring me a blank pad and a pencil, I would draw cartoons about the place and keep the men laughing. He gave me what I wanted.

One of the cartoons was about an inmate holding a phone in his hand and the other holding up the head of a huge statute he created that was inches from his head. The sentence underneath the cartoon said, “”Sorry Superintendent. Can I call you back. I am rather busy right at this particular moment.”        

After that, I use to carry them around the institution showing them to guards and inmates alike. One day,  one of the guards asked me if he would take it home to show his wife. I agreed and the next day, he returned it and said, I showed it to the super and he enjoyed them also.

The next morning the head of security came to the gate and signaled me to meet with him. He asked me if everything was ok for the men to returned to their cells, I told him that everything was cool

Minutes later, five guards came in to line us up. We were told that we had to strip   and leave our clothes behind but we could take our pillows and blankets back to our cells.

One of the guards who was called Dum Dum by the inmates since he acted so stupidly, began yelling at us. I walked to the head of security and suggested that he remove Dum Dum before he caused a riot in the cell. Dum Dum was removed.

A few days later, I was given an office on the top floor  of the administration building. At first, I thought it was because I kept everything cool in the huge cell. That wasn’t the reason. The Super wanted me kept from the other men. He feared that I might talk them into rioting again.                                                                                          
I had nothing to do in that office so I created work by making huge Christmas cards that would be hung on hallway walls during the Christmas season. The nurse who visited me every other day brought me what I needed.    

It finally dawned on me that the Superintendent would make sure that I didn’t talk to other inmates by making me walk down the stairs to the main floor and go into a small cell for my three meals which were brought to me. The cell had no furniture so I had to  eat my meals while sitting on the floor.

It finally dawned on him that I could still talk to my fellow inmates when I left my office at night to go to my cells on the second floor.

He found a way to solve that problem. I had insulted a guard and that was this excuse the superintendent needed to completely keep me from talking to my fellow inmates. He had me placed in a cell on the main floor where I remained for four months. It was a discipline cell.  The bed had no mattress but then no beds in the building had mattresses. We slept on the blankets that covered the springs of the beds. In the mornings, my blanket and pillow was removed and returned at nine at night.  During the days, I would lay on the floor to sleep away the time.                                                  

  I even had thought of committing suicide by wrapping my belt around my neck and the bed post and twisting my body so that I would suffocate to death.

What saved me was  that I found a way to amuse myself. The paint was peeling from one of the walls. When I looked at the wall, it looked like islands and two mainlands almost at the bottom and near the top of the wall. I had a pencil in my pocket that was unknown by the guards so I created  a puzzle. I drew lines from different points of the wall. Then I placed two digit numbers on each line depicting the time a bus would need to travel to get from one end of the wall to the other end after choosing the right lines. 

Keep in mind that there was no way that anyone trying to solve that problem would write the numbers on a piece of paper and compare the times. He had to keep  the numbers in in his head.

A year later  after I was free man, I met an inmate I knew as a friend while in the reformatory.  He told me that he was in that same cell after I left it. He said that the puzzle kept him busy and he still couldn`t come up with the correct answer. He asked me what the correct answer was. I couldn't tell him because I also didn't know the answer to that puzzle.

While I was in that cell, I could hear music from a loudspeaker and could speak loudly to the prisoners in the next cells so I wasn't actually isolated.

In my third month ( November 1962 ) being in the cell, the Superintendent finally became aware that guards were passing me chocolates to me because they really felt sorry for me considering that I didn’t really do nothing that justified me being in that punishment cell for so  long a period of time . They gradually knew that the real reason was that the superintendent wanted  to isolate me from the other  inmates in the reformatory.

The week before Christmas, I was woken up at five in the morning and taken to the captain`s office. The Super was in the office. He told me that I was being transferred to the Millbrook Reformatory that is near the town of Millbrook. I was pleased for two reasons.  I would no longer be in a punishment cell and the superintendent was an acquaintance of mine who years earlier offered me a job to work for him in a young offender`s correctional facility which I didn't except because I had another offer that seemed  to be better.

That was my experience at being in solitary confinement. It pales when compared to what other prisoners had to endure.  

Incidentally, Superintendent Sanderson was later fired because of mistreatment he authorized against an inmate that resulted in the inmate`s death.  

Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment distinguished by living in single cells with little or no meaningful contact to other inmates. It is specifically designed for disruptive inmates that are security risks to other inmates, the prison staff, or the prison facility itself. It is mostly employed for serious violations of discipline, such as murder, hostage-taking, deadly assault and  rioting. However, it is also used as a measure of protection for inmates, whose safety is threatened by other inmates. Prison authorities are supposed to  consider solitary confinement and administrative placement measure, not as a form of punishment. Solitary confinement is colloquially referred to as the hole. 

In my opinion, if the administration wishes to punish an inmate, it can simply not let the inmate out of his or her cell except for an hour each day to shower and exercise.  The meals brought to the inmate can be bland.

Solitary confinement has received severe criticism for having detrimental psychological effects on the minds of inmates who are subjected to solitary confinement for a great period of time. To them, it constitutes a form of torture.

According to a 2017 review study, it established that the negative psychological effects of solitary confinement leads to "an emerging consensus among correctional as well as professional, mental health, legal, and human rights organizations that the use of solitary confinement should be limited in its length as punishment.

Research surrounding the possible psychological and the physiological effects of solitary confinement dates back to the 1830s. When the new prison discipline of separate confinement was introduced at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829, commentators attributed the high rates of mental breakdown to the system of isolating prisoners in their cells. Charles Dickens, who visited the Philadelphia Penitentiary during his travels to America, described the "slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. Prison records from a Denmark prison between 1870 to 1920 indicated that staff noticed inmates were exhibiting signs of mental illnesses while in isolation, revealing that the persistent problem has been around for decades.

The first report by the Supreme Court of the United States about solitary confinement's effect on prisoner mental status was made in 1890 (In re Medley 134 U.S. 160). In it the court found that the use of solitary confinement produced reduced mental and physical capabilities. 

The use of solitary confinement in prisons was first introduced to regulate unruly prisoners and keep them away from the rest of the prison society. However, solitary confinement has been linked to several developments of mental disorders, one of which being Ganser syndrome. A man developed Ganser syndrome after being held in solitary confinement for a long-term sentence; however, that development is seen as rare and is unlikely in most cases.

The effects of solitary confinement on juveniles can be highly detrimental to their growth. The isolation of solitary confinement can cause anguish, provoke serious mental and physical health problems and obviously works against the rehabilitation for  the juveniles. Young people who were placed in solitary confinement had a profound effect on their chance to rehabilita and Human Rights Watch created a report that incorporated the testimony of some juvenile inmates. Many interviews described how their placement in solitary confinement exacerbated the stresses of being in jail or prison. Many spoke of harming themselves with staples, razors, even plastic eating utensils, having hallucinations, losing touch with reality, and having thoughts of or attempting suicide–all this while having very limited access to health care.

Many years ago back in the 1960s, in a federal prison in Kingston Ontario, an inmate was placed in a solitary cell that was in a very small building in one of the prison yards.  For days, he would be heard screaming that he was in pain. His cries for help were ignored. Then he became silent. The reason for his silence was that he was dead. His death was not from him committing suicide. He really was seiously physically ill. 

Juveniles in solitary confinement are routinely denied access to treatment, services, and programming required to meet their medical, psychological, developmental, social, and rehabilitative needs. The ACLU and the Human Rights Watch have made recommendations at both a State and Federal level regarding their lack of access to medical services etc.

As well as severe and damaging psychological effects, solitary confinement manifests physiologically as well. Solitary confinement has been reported to bring on  migraines, profuse   sweating  hypertension,   dizziness  and heart  palpitations. Many inmates also experience extreme weight loss due to digestion complications and abdominal pain. Many of these symptoms are due to the intense anxiety and sensory deprivation. Inmates can also experience neck and back pain and muscle stiffness due to long periods of little to no physical activity. These symptoms often worsen with repeated confinement  to solitary confinement.

In 1972, I was invited by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to visit most of the prisons and major jails in that state.  I was given a personal tour of each of  those facilities that I visited.

 

 

When I visited the San Quentin facility, I was taken to a particular cell in which a huge black man was serving his time in the only cell in that specific location in the prison. He had previously been sentenced to prison for life for committing a murder and in that particular cell for later murdering a prison guard.  He had been in that cell for eight years when I met him. He was permitted to paint pictures and there was a television set on the wall opposite his cell. There was a strong string between his cell and the TV set in which he could turn the set on and off. He seemed rational when I spoke to him.  Years later, he was released from that cell and spent the rest of his sentence with the general population of the prison.

Arthur Johnson of Philadelphia, who spent more than half his life in solitary confinement, filed a lawsuit claiming that his 37 years spent alone in a small cell amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and violated his right to due process under the United States Constitution. Johnson, was released from that cell  after a U.S. district court judge ordered his reintegration into the general population of the prison.  I cannot fathom what his state of mind would be like even when he was then serving his time in the general population of the prison.  

Johnson had no meaningful physical contact with another person since 1979. He was not allowed any contact visits and spent at least 23 hours a day locked up in his cell.

As part of the settlement, the state agreed to move Johnson to an institution closer to his family and not to return him to solitary confinement for his past offenses.

I appreciate that some form of punishment should be awarded to prisoners who cause problems in the prisons however, in my opinion, troublesome prisoners should be placed in their own regular cells for a week or so. That should be suffice unless they continue to be troublesome.

I have some concerns about placing prisoners whose lives are at risk spending 24 hours a day in solitary confinement. There was a young adult who =was a snitch (rat) in the reformatory  so he spent 23 hours of his time in his own cell. He could read books and he could hear the sound of the radio  in the distance. But worse yet, when the other men were returning to their cells, they would pass his cell and spit on him and throw cheese at him. He was being subjected to cruel treatment by being placed in a cell that the other inmates passed by him.

There was a man who was serving two terms of two-years less a day (four years) in a provincial prison facility. He was convicted of raping his baby on two occasions. That is why he got those two sentences. At night, he was placed in the solitary wing of the prison in his own cell. During the days, he spent his time in the prison`s chapel cleaning it. He could read the Bible of course and his meals would be brought to him in the chapelhe could talk to the guards if they chose to talk to him. He must have been terribly bored.

Putting inmates in isolationary confinement is allowing human beings to be treated worse than zoo animals. It simply doesn’t matter what the reason is. The impact of the practice on people is exactly the same. It is detrimental on their minds if they are kept in isolation for a long time.  

According to a March 2014 article in American Journal of Public Health, “Inmates in jails and prisons attempt to harm themselves in many ways, resulting in outcomes ranging from trivial to fatal."

^]Self-harm is greatly increased among inmates who are in solitary confinement. It was seven times higher among the inmates as seven percent of the jail population was confined in isolation and fifty-three percent of all acts of self harm took place there. Self-harm included, but was not limited to cutting, banging heads, self-amputations of fingers and/or testicles. The challenges rose as these inmates were in bare cells, but it drove these prisoners to jumping off their beds head first into the floor or even biting through their veins in their wrists. While some inmates are known to have psychiatric disorders prior to entering the prison, others develop mental disorders as a result of being placed in solitary confinement. A main issue within the prison system and solitary confinement is the high number of inmates who turn to self-harm. Studies have shown that the longer one stays in the prison, the more at risk he or she is to self-harm

One study has shown that inmates who were assigned to solitary confinement were 3.2 times as likely to commit an act of self-harm per 1000 days at some time during their incarceration as those never assigned to solitary confinement. The study had concluded that there is a direct correlation between inmates who self-harm and inmates that are punished into solitary confinement. Many of the inmates look to self-harm as a way to “avoid the rigors of solitary confinement. Mental health professionals ran a series of tests that ultimately concluded that “self-harm and potentially fatal self-harm associated with solitary confinement was higher independent of mental illness status and age group.

Physicians have concluded that for those inmates who enter the prison already diagnosed with a mental illness, the punishment of solitary confinement is extremely dangerous in that the inmates are more susceptible to exacerbating their symptoms.

The effects of isolation unfortunately do not stop once the inmate has been released from the solitary confinement cell if he or she has been in it for a very long time.  After the inmate is released, psychological effects have the ability to sabotage a prisoner's potential to successfully return to the community and adjust back to ‘normal’ life. The inmates are often startled easily, and avoid crowds and public places. They seek out confined small spaces because the public areas overwhelm their sensory stimulation.

The federal government of Canada  considered imposing a limit  of 15 days on holding prisoners in solitary confinement, but some say the move is not enough to meet the international bar for human right.  

I don`t believe that spending  i5 days in solitary confinement for punishment  is going to harm any prisoner if he or she can sit at a small table and read a book and the prisoner also has an opportunity to have a brief conversation with the guards that bring him or her their meals and who take the prisoner out for a shower and be permitted to exercise in an enclosed cell where  they can see outside the cell and the sky for an hour.  

If the prisoner is still going to be a risk to other inmates or the guards, then the prisoner can serve his or her time in his or her  ordinary cell until he and she has satisfied the head of the facility that he or she is ready to be released  into the general population of the prison. 

Eventually most of the prisoners are  released from prison. How will you feel if an angry neighbour  next to you, hates everyone because he was subjected to a long period of time in solitary confinement? 





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