Anthony Ehlers, a columnist incarcerated at Stateville who was trained by prisonjourn, wrote a powerful piece on the horror of solitary confinement.| ✍️ Anthony Ehlers👇
Solitary confinement has long been the punishment of choice for prisoners who draw the ire of prison officials. Its roots are at Cherry Hill, the world’s first penitentiary, built in Pennsylvania in 1829. It was founded by Quakers who believed that locking a prisoner away for months or years would reform them. Solitary confinement is the seminal philosophy of the criminal justice system in America.
Prison policymakers claim not to use solitary confinement anymore, disguising it behind a plethora of euphemistic terms: administrative detention, close management unit, control unit, disciplinary segregation unit, intensive management unit, involuntary protective custody, punitive segregation, restricted housing unit, security housing unit, special management unit, and supermax.
In solitary, you don’t notice it, but pretty quickly you begin to unravel. You pace the small cell, back and forth, back and forth. When I was a kid, I went to the zoo a few times. I used to see the tiger, who was always pacing back and forth. I used to wonder why he did that. Now I know. I felt like that animal, pacing back and forth. It almost became a compulsion.
I realized I had to get ahold of myself or I wouldn’t be able to come back. Isolation is full of severely mentally ill people. IDOC does not have the staff or the patience to deal with such prisoners. They usually get written disciplinary reports and are buried in isolation. Unable to understand what’s going on or why, they end up spending years or decades there. I’ve seen friends who were sane lose their minds in isolation.
I came out of isolation a much different person. I didn’t talk; I was afraid of social situations. The paranoia I fought so hard to control came back. I was afraid people were going to hurt me. I didn’t know how to interact with people, and I didn’t understand social cues. Humans are naturally social beings, and the social pain that isolation inflicts can be the most torturous and damaging, affecting the brain in the same regions and manner as physical pain. This social pain can actually cause longer-term suffering than physical pain, due to the ability of humans to relive social pain months or even years later.
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