Solitude and Torture

In a recent article for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande asks if the long-term solitary confinement endured by inmates in American "Super-Max" prisons is a kind of torture.

Gawande discusses a variety of scientific studies as well as the testimony of prison guards and inmates like Bobby Dellelo:

"After a few months without regular social contact...his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him."

Gawande goes on to argue that this extreme form of incarceration is not just cruel but also unnecessary and wasteful. He calls for policy reforms that would keep fewer inmates in solitary confinement and bring about a more humane prison system.

One of the ironies of American prison history is that the solitary confinement cell has its origins in reforms motivated by a similar spirit. In the early 19th century, authorities argued that convicts in the crowded, filthy prisons of their times were becoming the victims of abuse, contagious disease, and the corrupting influence of hardened criminals. In response, they proposed that inmates should be kept in isolation, where they could reflect on their lives and repent of their crimes.

By the 1820s, though, experiments in institutions such as New York's Auburn Prison had begun to reveal the kinds of terrible effects of isolation. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, who visited several American prisons in the 1830s, described them this way:

"Absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills."