Solitary Confinement: Looks a Lot Like Torture

By Harry Kimball, Newser Staff

Posted Mar 25, 2009 4:39 PM CDT

(Newser) – Rhesus monkeys raised in isolation are anti-social, catatonic, and profoundly disturbed even after they are introduced to their peers. The same is true of humans kept in solitary confinement for prolonged periods of time, whether as hostages or prisoners, writes Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. As months roll on, captives feel their minds slipping away, begin to hallucinate, and find it increasingly difficult to reenter society—many of them permanently.

Gawande's subjects range from Terry Anderson, held hostage by Hezbollah for 7 years, to inmates of the American prison system sentenced to long stints in solitary, who liken the experience to torture. So why does the US use it on tens of thousands of convicts? One inmate who learned his former jailer had been put in solitary himself said, “I’d let him out. I wouldn’t wish solitary confinement on anybody. Not even him.”

[Images (5)]

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Guantanamo is infamous for solitary confinement. (AP Photo)

A nurse keeps vigil outside an isolation cell containing an inmate who authorities fear might attempt suicide. (AP Photo)

In this Nov. 18, 2008 file photo, reviewed by the U.S. Military, a Guantanamo detainee peers through his hands from inside his cell at the Camp Echo detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base, in Guantanamo... (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

A jail cell in Pinellas County, Florida. (AP Photo)

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It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. - John McCain on solitary confinement

If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has? - Atul Gawande

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