Isolation

Finally caught up with a piece, "Hellhole," in a recent New Yorker on solitary confinement. We now know a lot about the isolation used at Gitmo, and the disciplinary use of "solitary" in U.S. prisons is common knowledge, but the article highlights how much more the U.S. has come to rely on solitary confinement. Like the outcomes for "enhanced interrogation," those in solitary don't learn their lesson or become more forthcoming. Instead, they literally lose their minds.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

Isolation only exacerbates discipline problems, leading to psychosis rather than changed behavior. As far back as 1890 isolation in the U.S. was deemed cruel and unusual punishment, and only in the last 20 years has its use increased beyond what any other country would even consider. The British, who have a long history of running prisons, including the incarceration of Irish political prisoners, have come up with a completely different solution.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

Of course, the American attitude is that prisoners need to be "punished," but if the goal is to peacefully house convicts then it seems much more sensible to try a different policy.