"Calls for Abolition in the Cradle of Solitary Confinement" by Thomas Dichter

On Monday, September 17, a crowd gathered at Philadelphia’s Love Park to hear survivors of solitary confinement and their family members speak out about conditions in Pennsylvania’s prison system. The rally was organized by the Human Rights Coalition, a grassroots group of family members of prisoners calling for the abolition of solitary confinement in the state. The event was held in anticipation of a state legislative hearing the following day, where representatives heard testimony from mental health professionals, legal experts, advocates, former inmates, and family members of prisoners in solitary confinement. The committee heard testimony from Robert King, the former Black Panther and one of the Angola 3, who spent 29 years in isolation following his widely condemned conviction for the murder of a prison guard in the 1970s. Theresa Shoats spoke about the effects of spending 30 of the last 40 years in solitary confinement on her father, imprisoned black radical Russell Maroon Shoats.

The setting of the hearing, Philadelphia’s Temple University, was particularly fitting, as the practice of solitary confinement was pioneered a mile away in the city’s notorious Eastern State Penitentiary. When prison reformers built Eastern State in 1829, its signature model of isolation was intended to provide prisoners with time and space for contemplation and rehabilitation. Yet, almost immediately, critics observed that solitary confinement produced debilitating psychological effects on prisoners. Charles Dickens, visiting the prison in the early 1840s, famously declared, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” While solitary confinement now serves an official purpose of maintaining “security” (and, as the testimony of survivors indicates, of administrative retaliation against insubordinate prisoners) instead of its original end of rehabilitation, the language of its critics remains eerily unchanged. Mental health experts at the Temple hearing decried the use of isolation for its reliable tendency to both cause and exacerbate mental illness in prisoners.

According to Solitary Watch, elected representatives at the hearing showed genuine interest in reforming the use of solitary confinement, with some legislators willing to consider its abolition altogether. Hearings were held on solitary confinement at a national level this summer, but Pennsylvania has the opportunity to lead the nation once again—having inaugurated the use of prolonged isolation in prisons in the nineteenth century, it could be the first state to abolish the practice in the twenty-first.  

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Thomas Dichter is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He focuses on the intertwined histories of race and imprisonment in the US. He is also a member of Decarcerate PA.