Lonelinesss: A Modern Torture Device

The concept of loneliness in modern times is often felt close to home, even in times of instantaneous connection. It’s a knot in your chest when you step into a silent room with no posters to look up to and not a pigment of paint to color the walls. It’s a lack of personal effects, projects or little games, the kind that gives you the feeling a person doesn’t have so much as a picture to put to frame. Solitude coils through the air like dust in an abandoned warehouse and rests its heavy tendrils on your shoulders, nests in your hair, weaves itself in and out of each quiet moment until you feel the staccato shifting from second to second, thought to thought. You’ve lost even the rhythm of your own heart and can feel nothing but the time, abrasive and ceaseless, as it flows against your mind, with not another soul to tell you what is real.

If too prolonged, solitude can be the death of, not only our mind, but the purpose of it: to relate, to compare and to feel things and to see another person and know that you’re one too.

According to the famous philosopher Hegel, true consciousness is only achieved in the presence of another, so that both minds know that they are something more than the objects which so easily fool our minds, slipping in and out of our awareness from moment to moment. The mind is a muscle that withers just the same as a person’s limbs might in a tiny seven by 10 foot cell, smaller than a parking lot space.

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This is the world Sarah Shourd, a trauma-informed investigative journalist and longtime anit-solitary confinement activist, left at the end of her 410 day stay in solitary confinement at Iran’s Evin prison, where she was taken as a political prisoner after her group was snatched from a tourist site near the Iran border with Northern Iraqi Kurdistan.

She was abducted just as Iran’s Green movement sprang up in response to the controversy of Iran’s 2009 presidential election, which kept the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power through results nearly universally believed to be fraudulent. This, combined with escalating nuclear tensions at the time, caused the country to lash out like a cornered animal, finding Sarah Shourd, who was an anti-war journalist and ESL teacher at the The International School Of Choueifat, guilty of espionage.

In an interview with the Daily Egyptian, on her recent visit to campus, Shourd said:

“The way that I adapted, and the tools that I developed to keep myself on track and keep myself from going over the edge of sanity are very similar to people that I’ve interviewed in this country. You know, a human being locked in a small cell has only you know, so many things to do. You start to talk to your body parts and name them, to come up with imaginary friends to talk to. If there’s an insect in your cell you become very emotionally tied to anything else living because you’re so desperate for any kind of relational experience in you know, nightmares, hallucinations. extreme stress, and pacing. And really, like, people that I talked to and I myself became, you know, often just kind of risen, reduced to like a feeling of an animal in a cage; just desperate, pacing back and forth, desperate for any sign of life outside of the confines of that cell.”

Although Iran’s government could procure no evidence for its claims, Shourd was kept in complete isolation for 22-23 hours a day in a cell with a metal grate over the window. Her only interactions were with her interrogators and occasionally with her fellow detainees. The right to visit the latter group, which included her then-fiance Shane Bauer, only came after she went on a week-long hunger strike, which won her only a handful of minutes blindfolded in a padded cell with them. Eventually, daily half hour visits were arranged in an open air cell, though Shourd was in such a powerless state that she could never be entirely sure they would continue to happen.

“We all need to feel belonging and connection: we are a social species. When we don’t feel belonging, when we feel hated and targeted and devalued, we have nothing to believe in and nothing to direct us. Some people will endure because they, at some point, have enough love, or a strong enough belief system can overcome that, but the vast majority of people decompensate [lose the ability to maintain normal psychological defenses] and turn on themselves. They become their own torturers. The suicide rate in solitary confinement is much higher than in general prison. People self-mutilate. People that go in with mental illness become more and more mentally ill until they are near catatonic.”

On Sept 14, 2010, the Iranian government released Shourd for a sum of $500,000 dollars, paid by the government of Oman. She could reasonably have thought herself free from the barbarous clutches of one of the West’s greatest villains – Iran, a rogue state responsible for funding a litany of terrorist groups and violently foisting its theocracy on democracy-loving Iranians. What she discovered upon her return home was that, in the United States, the practice was standardized: used casually as a tool to separate inmates in U.S. prisons.

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The United Nations’ Convention Against Torture defines torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person “for information, punishment, intimidation, or for a reason based on discrimination.” This includes solitary confinement, and the UN Committee Against Torture has repeatedly condemned the United States for it’s massive excess of prisoners in long-term solitary confinement.

However, the U.S. has declined to ratify the Convention Against Torture, as well as many other U.N. documents despite often sponsoring them. The U.S. often writes in clauses and conditions exempting itself, but, as an increasing number of studies have connected the practice to severe psychological damage, modern movements have begun to push officials to end the practice.

“Solitary confinement as a practice was invented in the United States. It was invented by the Quakers at the Walnut Street jail, which later became the Eastern [State] penitentiary, which is now a museum in Philadelphia,” Shourd said. “They thought that leaving someone in isolation would help people find their inner relationship to God. But they quickly saw that the opposite happened; that people lost their minds and hurt themselves and decompensated. We’ve exported this model, so the conditions that I was in, in Evin prison in Tehran, for 410 days, are very similar to the conditions in this country. Except people are put in solitary in this country far longer. I mean, I was in for over a year. People here are in solitary for decades for petty offenses, an offense being speaking up for their rights or organizing in some way.”

According to a 2021 Yale Law School study, approximately 45,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the U.S. (a figure that includes juveniles). Solitary confinement being defined as isolation for 22 hours a day or more for a period for 15 days or more.

As recently as 2022, Alfred Woodfox, a survivor of 42 years in solitary confinement, died of Covid-19 related illness, only five years after a plea deal for his unsettled case allowed him to walk free again. Three separate indictments allowed his torment to continue for decades due to evidence against him often proving unreliable in the case of his bank robbery and manslaughter charges. He was a member of the Black Panthers, having encountered them in a New York jail before he was transferred to his permanent cell at Louisiana State Penitentiary, or “Angola,” the name of the slave plantation the prison replaced.

“Some of them [people in solitary confinement] had connections to the Black Panther Party and more like leftist political movements, and were doing prison organizing, and that’s perceived as a threat to the control that prison administration has over incarcerated populations,” said Sara Vogel, an editor for Solitary Watch, a group of journalists and researchers (including Shourd) that scrutinize the use of solitary confinement in the justice system.

“So as these people continue to make connections and build any form of solidarity, whether it is related to gang activity, or if it is genuinely some kind of connection to other people within prison, they’re perceived as threats and they’re put in solitary for extended periods of time.”

Woodfox credited the Black panthers with giving him morals he had never had before, curing him of his desire to commit crimes. According to the New York Times, Woodfox and other prisoners were often forced to work the fields by guards on horseback wielding shotguns. Accusations of sexual slavery plagued the prison. Despite witnesses to the case often proving to be unreliable in some shape or form, Louisiana’s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, called him “The most dangerous person on the planet,” according to NPR in 2008. Woodfox wrote a memoir called “Solitary” in 2019 on the system that claimed his life for the possibility that he took another’s.

Vogel said, “A lot of the time these long term sentences are used for people who are perceived to be great threats to prison safety, or for people who are severely mentally ill. They continuously go through the cycle of having two weeks to a month sentences in solitary confinement and then they are released from solitary back into the general population and get sent back because they disobey orders or they stand up too slowly during Roll Call, or they talk back to a guard, which also happens in solitary confinement. When you’re in solitary, if you continue to do things that break prison rules, regardless of what those rules are and regardless of if it is actually a threat to safety or not, they just compound your sentence in solitary and continue to not release you.”

Shourd, who visited and spoke with 75 prisoners in solitary confinement from prisons all over the U.S., condemns modern prison labor and solitary confinement as racially-biased, noting that prison wages are so little, often lower than 50 cents an hour, and the percentage of black prisoners so high, that our system is better referred to as a “carceral state.”

According to a study from the Justice Policy Center, a research group dedicated to improving the justice system, “Solitary confinement in prison is used more frequently among Black and Hispanic/Latino men. Bertsch and coauthors (2020) found that of all men in solitary confinement in the summer of 2019, 43.4 percent were Black, a higher rate than their representation in the US prison population (40.5 percent).”

“I heard examples of someone who was forced in Arkansas prison to pick cotton. And when he refused to pick cotton, he was beaten,” said Shourd. “We live in a big country and prison looks different in different places. But for prison labor I’ve never heard of anything even approaching fair, prisoners don’t have rights. They can’t unionize. So, to call what they do labor as far as an actual legitimate job is just not accurate.”

To Shourd, a prison abolitionist, race has always been part of the picture, which she considers part of a dichotomy between transformative justice and punitive justice.

“So prison abolition is actually an invitation into reimagining safety and justice in our country, saying, locking people up, you know, punishing them, depriving them of any resources or any ability, or means to be accountable for the harm they may have done. Because, for sure, there are people, people in prison that have done a lot of harm. It’s also true that almost everyone that perpetuates violence, has experienced violence. No one experiences violence for the first time by doing it. So abolition asks us to look at the cycles of harm, and the root causes, and not blame the individual. We live in a very individualist society that says, ‘you did something bad, therefore you are bad’, not ‘let’s be curious about why and what happened to your sense of belonging to something; to your community, or your family? What happened to you that would cause you to do that? Let’s get to the root of it so it doesn’t happen again and we can understand why other people do this.’”

According to Shourd and Solitary Watch, there is no federal apparatus regulating the use of solitary confinement in prisons, making it extremely difficult for journalists to collect any information uninfluenced by state officials on the sites of the prison. According to Shourd and Solitary Watch, communities around prisons are often forced to simply take prison official’s word that circumstances inside of prisons are humanitarian.

“I don’t do traditional journalism. I’m a trauma-informed journalist and my investigations have been adapted into creative projects,” Shourd said. “So, I’m much more interested in personal testimony and narrative and doing and practicing a form of journalism that does no harm to the people that I’m interviewing and the people who are sharing their stories. So that is, to me doing no harm. In traumatized communities and populations, it is far more important than some kind of outdated idea of objectivity. I think it can be thorough, and you can be transparent about the limitations of getting data to support the claims, but personal testimonies are often all we have to contradict what a sheriff or a warden says about their prison and the people that are incarcerated. And the sheriff or warden is in a position where often journalists will see their perspective as legitimate but not the person incarcerated.”

Vogel, who started out at Solitary Watch sorting through the mail the organization gets from prisoners, says that the vast majority of Solitary Watch’s reporting on the conditions of modern prisons relies upon prisoners who have themselves become journalists or advocates after witnessing the brutal conditions of U.S. prisons first hand.

“A lot of times, how we get started on articles is that we hear something either from the advocacy community, who has like this humongous network of advocates who are either formerly incarcerated themselves or who are friends and family members who have been or are incarcerated,” Vogel said. “And from there we form our articles and we do our investigations. It’s really hard because of the limits on communication in and out of prisons, and specifically with prisoners in and out of solitary confinement. It’s really hard.”

In the past, Solitary Watch had provided grants to prisoners interested in writing their own articles. Currently, the organization is preparing to send out a second round of grants.

“When past sheriffs or wardens have lied to the public blatantly and been caught in lies, they shouldn’t be seen as reliable sources just because of their position of power,” Shourd said. “So I think traditional methods are a very flawed metric for determining truth when we have these institutions that have no oversight and no transparency.”

Solitary Watch publishes the best prisoner letters it receives, including the following excerpt from a (at the time) 54-year-old woman held at New York Correctional Institution that describes the start of a stint in solitary confinement.

“Upon arrival in the cold, dreary backdrop known as “SEG” [Administrative Segregation], I could already hear the madness that occurs under such dire conditions,” L. LeDonne wrote. “I heard the yelling between two girls recently brought in for fighting. One girl’s nose was sprawled across her face, covered in crimson streaks that had not yet dried, confirming the violence. I watched the COs chuckle and laugh as they placed bets on which girl would win if they let them fight, and they decided to place them in our rec cages (my dog had a nicer one) outside to see it play out. I was appalled by their barbaric behavior. ‘Video et Taceo’—‘I see and I am silent’—had become my survival mantra. I was brought into a cell, stripped, searched, and given stiff red scrubs. The finality of the door slamming shut will reverberate forever in my psyche.”

According to Vogel, prisoners are barely ever able to receive proper medical care, only receiving about 20 to 30 minutes of practitioner’s time when health issues, including psychological issues that solitary confinement complicates, come up.

According to the Prison Policy Institute, prisoners in solitary confinement usually only make up about 6% to 8% of the prison population, but represent half of the suicides.

In the Washington Journal of Law and Policy, Dr Stuart Grassian found that extensive solitary confinement in the early days of the prison system was discontinued for similar reasons.

“The results were, in fact, catastrophic. The incidence of mental disturbances among prisoners so detained, and the severity of such disturbances, was so great that the system fell into disfavor and was ultimately abandoned. During this process a major body of clinical literature developed which documented the psychiatric disturbances created by such stringent conditions of confinement.”

According to Vogel, many prisoners are sent to psychiatric institutions when symptoms become severe enough, but, due to capacity issues, these institutions are unable to retain them after they become stable again. They are sent directly back to prison and its solitary confinement-reliant system, which caused their illness in the first place. A 2014 Treatment Advocacy Center study found on one of Solitary Watch’s fact sheets says that 350,000 individuals with severe mental illnesses were being held in U.S. prisons and jails in 2012, while only 35,000 were patients in state psychiatric hospitals.

“You can even go even further back to the late 50s early 60s, when there was the closing down of all of the public mental health hospitals,” Vogel said. “And so there was this movement for deinstitutionalization in the mid-20th century, and the thought process behind that was that taking people out of these institutions and putting them back in the communities would allow for the communities to support them in ways that the institutions couldn’t. But what ended up happening was that as these institutions were defunded, and as these institutions were closed down, that money was not redirected to the communities to provide adequate care to individuals who are coming home.”

Consequently, people were forced out of the structured environment of institutions and back onto the streets, where they returned to violence and crime as the solutions to their problems. This landed much of the severely mentally ill population of the U.S. in prison, an environment designed only to keep them off the streets.

In his studies, Grassian found that solitary confinement was capable of producing its own set of symptoms, completely independently from any previous mental illness of the detainees.

“The paradigmatic psychiatric disturbance was an agitated confusional state which, in more severe cases, had the characteristics of a florid delirium, characterized by severe confusional, paranoid, and hallucinatory features, and also by intense agitation and random, impulsive, often self-directed violence. Such disturbances were often observed in individuals who had no prior history of any mental illness. In addition, solitary confinement often resulted in severe exacerbation of a previously existing mental condition. Even among inmates who did not develop overt psychiatric illness as a result of solitary confinement, such confinement almost inevitably imposed significant psychological pain during the period of isolated confinement and often significantly impaired the inmate’s capacity to adapt successfully to the broader prison environment.”

Shourd and Vogel are skeptical of many solutions to the behemoth creature of bureaucracy which is our prison system. Shourd is wary of most attempts to imprison people rather than incorporate them into specialized reform programs, believing that all forms of imprisonment traumatize and damage prisoners. According to her, the only real value in the prison system is its ability to isolate people from the circumstances which led to their crime, giving them room to change. Enlarging our surveillance state by placing prisoners under house arrest or otherwise allowing the government to monitor them is dismissed, but reallocating police funding to the right groups is most supported by Vogel.

“We have this thought that prisons are a place for rehabilitation, but then when we actually look at what prisons do, and the programming that is available in prisons, and the resources that are available in prisons, we realize that they’re not built to actually rehabilitate people,” Vogel said. “They’re built to punish people. And so, I think that working with models of restorative justice and community care-based models of justice is really important in preventing people from going into prison in the first place. But that doesn’t mean that the people who are already in prison aren’t deserving of care themselves.”

Shourd said, the U.S. needs to learn from its mistakes.

“As a society, we should want a system that actually makes us safer and what actually makes people less likely to recidivate is, not to torture them with isolation to dehumanize them, to stigmatize them to deny them more resources, but to really address what is the root cause of the actions that led to them doing harm if they did harm. And in many cases, people are just in prison for being poor, for being Black, for being at the wrong place at the wrong time or being targeted. Some people have done harm and those people you know, studies show that that a very, very, very small percentage of people actually harm again, the most violent crimes are the least likely to ever harm again, because people are very often traumatized by having committed a violent crime, and it sticks with you the rest of your life and people want to heal they want to change. They want to live in a world where something that horrible doesn’t doesn’t haunt them anymore, right. People want to be redeemed. people want to do ‘sorry’.”

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