A Prison Within a Prison: History and Perspectives on Solitary Confinement in the United States
When I began writing this, nearly 2 billion people were under some kind of stay-at-home order. I, along with most Americans, was one of them. Just a week before I started writing this very paragraph, New York governor Andrew Cuomo addressed cabin fever in a nationally televised press conference. He called it a “real situation” that “in many ways threatens the essence of our Constitution.”
But what if the conditions were starker? What if our children and our spouses and our pets were all gone, and our homes were the size of a parking space? What if the lights were always on and our beds were nothing more than foam pads on a concrete slab? And what if we measured our isolation in years and decades rather than weeks and months?
Solitary confinement has been used in the United States, in some form, since at least the middle of the eighteenth century. As a practice, it has evolved over time. The theories behind it have changed, as have the conditions. And it has exploded in scale: a 2018 survey conducted by the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) and the Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School estimates that there were approximately sixty-one-thousand people in isolation in the fall of 2017.
Despite its massive scale, solitary confinement in America’s jails and prisons remains an enigma, hidden behind the razor wire-topped fences of a notoriously opaque prison system. The four-year-old Yale/ASCA survey represents the best available estimate of the number of people in isolation. Little research has been done on the physical and psychological effects that solitary confinement has on prisoners and the guards that oversee them.
Because prisons are primarily administered at the state level, data is difficult to assemble. Everything from the number of hours prisoners spend in their cells to the privileges that are available to them are determined at the state level, if not by individual prisons. Solitary confinement carries different official names: restrictive housing, administrative segregation (or “ad-seg” for short), security housing unit or “SHU” (pronounced “shoe”), among others. The extent to which solitary confinement is used also varies widely, with a high of approximately nineteen percent of prisoners held in isolation in Louisiana to a low of 0.1% of prisoners in Colorado.
Whether solitary confinement is effective — and what that means — depends on who you ask. To prison officials and staff, it is an essential tool for maintaining order within prison walls. To prisoners and activists, it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. There is, however, some agreement between these groups. Prisoners and corrections officers alike refer to solitary confinement as a “prison within a prison.” But whatever it is called, and however it is administered, one thing is certain: solitary confinement is the harshest form of imprisonment in the United States, and we still know very little about how it affects the people who must endure and administer it.
“Others Still, Committed Suicide”
In Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, nestled between the Schuylkill river and the city’s center, a stone fortress rises just above the roofs of the rowhouses that line the surrounding streets. The four outer walls of the structure are each exactly one-half mile long with turrets at each corner. The entrance on Fairmount Avenue is flanked by two towers with ivy-covered walls. The ivy is well-maintained, and a large, red folding sign that reads “Open for Tours” sits on the Fairmount Avenue sidewalk every day from 10 AM to 4 PM. Designated a national historical landmark in 1965, the structure looks like a relic of the past. But as America’s first experiment with large-scale, long-term solitary confinement, Eastern State Penitentiary is a monument to what would be the future of the United States penal system.
When construction was completed in 1836, Eastern State Penitentiary was a modern marvel. It contained 450 centrally heated solitary confinement cells and cost “nearly $780,000” to build, making it one of the nation’s most expensive public buildings at the time according to the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Society. The architecture was reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, featuring seven cell blocks that protruded like spokes from an octagonal central guard tower.
The theory underlying Eastern State Penitentiary was set out in an 1829 statute and came to be known as “the Pennsylvania System.” The theory promised to improve upon the failures and shortcomings of earlier, more punitive theories of solitary confinement carried out at prisons like the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia and Auburn State Prison in New York. Under the Pennsylvania system, prisoners were to be “kept singly and separately at labour” and were to have access to religious texts. Though the prisoners were to have no visits from friends and family, the statute provided for regular visitation by a variety of prison staff, including a religious instructor.
Mandatory religious instruction, and the reasoning behind it, was the hallmark feature of the Pennsylvania System. The statute provided that religious instruction was to be provided “in such manner as to make [the prisoners’] confinement as far as possible the means of their reformation, so that when restored to their liberty they may prove honest, industrious and useful members of society.” The primary purpose of these visits, and of the Pennsylvania system more generally, was rehabilitation.
The reformers and legislators that devised the Pennsylvania System believed that through solitary reflection, hard work, and religious instruction, prisoners would see the error of their ways; that they would become repentant and thus rehabilitate. As philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in his seminal work on the birth of prisons, Discipline & Punish, “In absolute isolation — as at Philadelphia — the rehabilitation of the criminal is expected not of the application of a common law, but of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to what may enlighten him from within.” This, indeed, is how Eastern State Penitentiary got its name. A place for penitence and rehabilitation, the prison on Fairmount Avenue was the first prison in history to carry the name “penitentiary.” Grave issues with the Pennsylvania system, however, quickly became apparent.
When celebrated English author Charles Dickens visited Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, he noted the deteriorated condition of the prisoners that he interacted with. Of one sailor who had been confined for eleven years, Dickens writes: “Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh upon his fingers, and raise his eyes for an instant, every now and then, to those bare walls which have seen his head turn grey . . . Does he never look men in the face, and does he always pluck at those hands of his, as though he were bent on parting skin and bone? It is his humor, nothing more.” The deteriorated, antisocial condition of the people confined at Eastern State Penitentiary left an indelible impression on Dickens. “I went from cell to cell that day,” he writes, “and every face I saw, or word I heard, or incident I noted, is present to my mind in all its painfulness.”
The administrators of Eastern State Penitentiary took great exception to criticism from Dickens and other reformers. They set out to distinguish the Pennsylvania model from earlier models that did not provide for interaction and instruction. They reminded critics that the Pennsylvania system was much more humane than corporal punishment models that were still in use. Despite these public statements, administrators at Eastern slowly relaxed the Pennsylvania System from behind the prison walls. They began allowing prisoners out of their cells to perform work. Communication between prisoners, which was strictly forbidden by statute, was rarely punished. According to leading scholars Drs. Keramet Reiter and Ashley T. Rubin, “During the decades to follow, prisoners were increasingly housed with cellmates, allowed to work in congregate workshops, and released together to exercise in the prison’s yards.” Though Eastern’s administrators continued to emphasize the importance of rehabilitation, by the 1870s and 80s, “solitary confinement was no longer a core component of the formal regime.”
While the long-term solitary confinement that defined the Pennsylvania System was waning, a new debate about whether and when solitary confinement was appropriate began to emerge in the United States.
Some commentators who opposed long-term solitary confinement began to argue that it might still be useful in a shorter-term setting. According to Rubin and Reiter, Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight, who had advocated for the harsher system of confinement imposed at Auburn in New York, argued in 1867 that “the ‘proper place’ of the Pennsylvania System was in jails, for short-term confinement, and in the early portion of one’s longer confinement.” Wines’ son, Frederick, would affirm his father’s view. In an 1890 paper, he advocated for short-term confinement in jails, “especially for the accused while waiting [sic] trial.” In the same year, however, the Supreme Court issued a stinging rebuke of solitary confinement. The case, In Re Medley, has been cited by abolitionists and reformers ever since.
In September of 1889, Joseph Medley was found guilty of murdering his wife in Colorado. Sentenced to death, Medley was to be imprisoned in solitary confinement for one month, then to be taken from his cell to the place of his execution “upon a day and hour designated by the warden.” This exercise of control by the warden — rather than the practice of solitary confinement itself — was what Medley was protesting in his lawsuit.
Medley applied to the court for what is known as a writ of habeas corpus, a legal remedy available to prisoners that is fairly common, if somewhat technical. A writ of habeas corpus is a court order that demands that a public official — in this case, the warden — to deliver a prisoner to the court and show a valid reason for the prisoner’s detention. Medley argued that he was sentenced under a law that did not allow for the warden to hold him indefinitely while he was awaiting his execution, and that in fact the law required the sentencing judge to order an execution date that was not more than four weeks after sentencing. The court agreed and granted Medley his writ, ordering his release.
Though Medley’s legal claim did not challenge the practice of solitary confinement, the court found the case a convenient vehicle to comment on its brutality. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Miller, noted that “experience demonstrate[s] that there [are] serious objections” to the practice of keeping prisoners in solitary confinement. Recounting reports of the effects that solitary confinement had on prisoners, Justice Miller continued: “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide.” Moreover, Miller noted, “those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” The Pennsylvania System, in other words, had failed to achieve its rehabilitative goal.
Although Justice Miller’s rebuke of solitary confinement was strong, it did not carry the weight of law. His criticism was issued in what courts and lawyers call dicta: a portion of a court opinion that does not speak to the legal claims at issue in a case and thus does not bind future court decisions. In 1891, just a year after Medley was decided, the Supreme Court upheld solitary confinement as a constitutional form of imprisonment in McElvaine v. Brush.
Over the next fifty years, the Supreme Court mentioned solitary confinement only twice. In both United States v. Moreland (1922) and Chambers v. Florida (1940), the Court noted the severity of solitary confinement while upholding the practice as constitutional. These decisions were followed in the 1960s and 70s by an onslaught of lawsuits by incarcerated individuals challenging the conditions of confinement in prisons across the country. “Every major case in this litigation movement,” say Rubin and Reiter, “addressed the question of conditions in solitary confinement.”
In 1978, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that would change the debate around the use of solitary confinement in the United States forever. In Hutto v. Finney, Arkansas prisoners challenged a method of discipline known as “punitive isolation.” The conditions that the prisoners complained of were horrifying. Anywhere from four to eleven prisoners were held in cells measuring just eight feet by ten feet. They received less than one thousand calories per day for sustenance. These scant calories came from meat, potatoes, oleo, syrup, vegetables, eggs, and seasoning that were mashed together and served in four-inch squares known as “grue” or “nutraloaf.” When placed in these conditions, the incarcerated individuals were not told how long they would be subjected to them. All of these things taken together, the prisoners argued, amounted to a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
The Hutto court did not find the gruesome conditions of Arkansas’ punitive isolation unconstitutional. Rather, the court determined that holding prisoners in those conditions for an indeterminate amount of time was unconstitutional, and thus upheld a time-limit of 30 days that had been imposed by a lower court. The Hutto court’s most important determination, however, came in a footnote. In the eighth footnote to the decision, the court proclaimed that the Constitution “does not require that every aspect of prison discipline serve a rehabilitative purpose.” This footnote would come to change the landscape of the debate around solitary confinement in the United States. From this point forward, prison administrators would no longer argue that solitary confinement served a rehabilitative purpose. Instead, these officials began actively campaigning against the idea that it was required to.
After a period of extreme prison violence in the 1970s, a “tough on crime” ethos emerged in American political discourse. Unprecedented deference was given to prison officials on the planning, building, and running of the nation’s prisons. In the remote deserts, rolling hills, and expansive fields of rural America, a new type of prison began to emerge: the American Supermax.
Supermax prisons are specifically designed for the long-term solitary confinement of the people warehoused in them. Supermax prisons were lauded by proponents as state-of-the-art facilities that would maximize efficiency, officer safety, and inmate control. They were specifically designed to address the constitutional challenges to prior conditions of isolation. Most often made of poured concrete, the cells were easy to clean and difficult to destroy. They provided lighting, beds, and usually a desk. To the casual observer, they would appear sterile and fresh; they would appear humane.
The Special Management Unit of the Eyman State Prison Complex in Florence, Arizona was the first supermax facility constructed in the United States. It had 768 beds and was completed in 1986. By the middle of the 1990s, nearly every state in the country had a supermax facility, thus embedding long-term solitary confinement into America’s mass incarceration system.
“The Bottom of the Food Chain”
When I spoke with Matt in early April 2020, he had been out of work for a week. He explained that he had been exposed to a colleague that had tested positive for COVID-19 and had been in quarantine ever since. “I’ve been jumping through hoops all day to try and get clearance to go back,” he told me. He didn’t want me to think he was blowing me off.
Matt, and his colleague Jimmy (not their real names), are corrections officers working in the same mid-Atlantic state where they attended high school together. Jimmy has been working at a county jail for nearly ten years; Matt has worked at a state prison for eight. I was nervous to tell Matt that I was writing about solitary confinement. To my surprise, he was eager to speak to me. “It’s definitely a good topic to talk about,” he said. “Our opinion and our point of view is really . . .” His voice trailed off as he paused to collect his thoughts. “People don’t get a view of it. They don’t understand why we lean towards [using solitary confinement] instead of against it.”
I asked whether Matt felt corrections officers’ voices were adequately represented in conversations about reforming the use of solitary confinement, or “administrative segregation” as it is more commonly called in corrections circles.
“I’m gonna say a hard absolutely not,” he told me. Matt told me that his state is “very lenient” on the use of solitary confinement. “A lot of times they don’t want to use it,” he said. “In my state,” he went on, “they don’t even really take corrections officers’ opinions on it. I think this is good to be put out there, because our opinions, I don’t think, ever have been addressed; our concerns haven’t been looked at when it comes to the fact that we think it works rather than it doesn’t.”
Jimmy and Matt both view solitary confinement as an essential tool for corrections officers. Jimmy, in particular, stressed that maintaining safety is a paramount part of his work. “My job is to keep inmates safe,” he said. “The only real deterrent that we have as corrections officers . . . is to take [prisoners’] time from them. That’s all we can really do. I think it’s a vital tool, and I think if it’s ever taken away, you’d be putting correctional staff at a real disadvantage.” Matt pointed out that prisoners and corrections officers are not the only populations that need protection. “There’s a ton of civilians that work [in jails and prisons]. Anywhere from kitchen workers to medical and education. If these people aren’t safe — if they don’t feel safe that these guys have a deterrent from doing the things that they possibly could do — they’re not going to be able to get their jobs done.”
The idea of deterrence, and the need for a way to punish inmates who break prison rules, dominated my conversations with Jimmy and Matt. “It’s not our job to punish you . . . for the crime that you’ve committed,” Jimmy said. “Being incarcerated, period, is your punishment. But once you are in there and you continue to . . . do things that warrant a punishment, there are a very few limited things that we can do to you to remove you and protect other inmates and staff members that are legal. So, the thing that we can do to you needs to be effective.” Matt agreed. “If you take that away,” he told me, “then these guys have no repercussions.”
Both Matt and Jimmy expressed frustration that corrections officers are not solicited for their opinions when activists and legislators talk about reforming solitary confinement. “When it comes to the political set,” Matt said, “I believe that, like, once someone’s on one side of it they’re going to fight it and try to say everything bad about it that there is rather than get the actual facts.” “Especially the reform people . . .” Jimmy started, pausing in frustration. “I don’t know if they’ve ever been in a scenario where they’ve seen how bad things could get inside a correctional facility.” Letting out a sigh, Jimmy recounted some of his more unpleasant experiences. “When you see people throw bodily fluids, feces, things like that . . . and they’re doing it purposefully to put people in contact with that . . . what do you do with people like that?”
Despite bearing witness to what Jimmy called “humanity at its lowest,” both officers maintained that they have a good rapport with the inmates that they work with. Matt told me, “I talk to these guys; I socialize with these guys. I don’t treat them like animals. I treat them like they treat me.” He went on to say that the incarcerated people he works with would say that he is fair. Jimmy echoed this sentiment.
“I don’t hold a grudge,” Jimmy said. He emphasized that he doesn’t treat people housed in solitary differently than individuals in general population. Even as an officer, he said, he understands their circumstances. “You can receive ‘hole time’ for a number of infractions that I think any inmate could find themselves in the middle of” just by virtue of being incarcerated, he told me.
Although they see the humanity in the incarcerated people that they work with, neither Jimmy nor Matt credits the argument that solitary confinement constitutes torture. “These guys aren’t going down in a hole; they’re not being tortured,” Matt said. “They’re still getting every meal that they’re supposed to get, they’re still getting it delivered to their cells . . . It’s not like they’re being withheld anything that they’re supposed to have.”
Jimmy argues that the entertainment industry makes solitary confinement out to be worse than it is. “Any TV show or movie that you watch, I feel like prisons and jails are painted in this light where somebody goes into the hole [and] the cell is so small that they can’t stand up or stretch out and there’s always water dripping on them and you got some guy that walks by and rattles the cage door with his club or whatever when he walks by.” For Jimmy, reality stands in stark contrast. “They’re put in a cell with a toilet, a sink, a bed. They receive regular time out. We do health and wellness checks every thirty minutes. You’re not left alone in a dark hole to possibly die.” Jimmy did acknowledge, however, that solitary confinement can have a profound effect on some prisoners.
“I have seen guys deteriorate inside,” Jimmy said. “There’s guys who have a hard time doing it.”
Exasperated, Jimmy said, “I would love for somebody to sit back and provide the correctional community with another option that is anywhere near as effective.” “Corrections officers are commonly thought of as the bottom of the food chain in terms of law enforcement,” he told me. “I don’t think that our opinions really are considered all too often.” He went on, “Oftentimes corrections officers may be jaded . . . “[and] people don’t believe that we can give an unbiased point of view.” Still, Jimmy believes that corrections officers should be treated as individuals. “If anybody ever did take the time to sit down and talk to a wide variety of corrections officers,” he said, “I think they’d realize that they’d probably get a pretty reasonable [conversation].” “As far as why we’re not often sought out for our opinions,” Jimmy said, “it’s probably because we’re not respected that much, our opinions aren’t respected that much.”
“Like Living in a Tomb”
I met with Kimberly Jenkins-Snodgrass via video conference. She was in a bright home office. Sunlight shown in through an off-camera window enhancing the natural glow of her light-chestnut-colored cheeks. Her brown eyes were slightly obscured by the reflection of her computer screen in the lenses of her burnt umber-colored glasses. Her black hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail. A faint hint of gray peeked out where her hair met her forehead.
Snodgrass is an Army veteran and has worked as a consultant for NASA for fifteen years. In her spare time, she serves as the chair of Interfaith Action for Human Rights (IAHR), a faith-based organization that works “to end policies and practices that promote torture” in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Her reason for working with IAHR is simple: the organization works with people in solitary confinement, and her son Kevin was held in solitary confinement at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia for four consecutive years.
“The reason I became a board member is because one of the board members . . . was communicating with my son. We met and I told her that I [wanted] to be a part of what she was doing.” Snodgrass told me that she strongly believes that African Americans need to be involved in freeing prisoners. “We have to get involved in freeing our loved ones — our sons and daughters,” she said. “I wanted to roll up my sleeves and be a part of helping to free not only my son from solitary confinement,” she said, “but to free others.”
Kevin’s journey to solitary confinement was not atypical. Snodgrass told me that he was involved in a fist fight and sentenced to thirty to sixty days in “the hole,” a solitary confinement wing in the main complex at Red Onion. “He was never returned to general population,” she told me.
Red Onion State Prison has two compounds: a general population complex and a supermax complex built to house prisoners in long-term solitary confinement. After being released from the hole, Snodgrass said, Kevin was moved to the supermax unit rather than being returned to general population. Once there, she explained, it was nearly impossible for him to get out.
At Red Onion, prisoners in long-term solitary confinement must complete a seven step “step-down” program to be released. At first glance, Snodgrass told me, the program looks easy. The program consists of seven modules, each requiring prisoners to complete a workbook. “I have seen one of the books,” she said, and told me that anyone with an education above the eighth grade should be able to complete them relatively easily. “The issue,” she said, “is how the classes are administered.”
Though the step-down program appears easy, the process that Snodgrass described was nothing short of Kafkaesque. She explained that Kevin’s workbooks were often not delivered timely. At least once, she recounted, Kevin waited four months between finishing a module and receiving a workbook for the next. “If you get an infraction or charge,” she explained, “they can start you over.” Infractions that could set prisoners back in the program, Snodgrass said, can be as small as “having too many stamps.” This aspect of the program is particularly troubling. “It becomes a circle,” Snodgrass told me, “you can be in the program forever . . . it’s definitely a revolving program where you can’t get out.”
Being in solitary confinement, Snodgrass told me, “is like living in a tomb.” “If you’re at the zero level, you have nothing,” she said. “No electronics, two phone calls per month, and your commissary allowance is, like, five dollars. Can you imagine what you can get for five dollars on the commissary sheet? You really have nothing.” More important, she noted, is the lack of human contact that prisoners experience. “You are always in an environment where you have no contact, and that’s where the psychological damage occurs.” At Red Onion, race relations complicate the matter further.
Red Onion State Prison is located in the Appalachian Mountains at the southwestern tip of Virginia. This not only further isolates prisoners from their friends and families — the prison is five hours from where Snodgrass lives and where Kevin was arrested — but it creates an environment where scores of minority men are overseen by white guards who don’t often interact with African Americans that aren’t prisoners. Abuses, said Snodgrass, run rampant. “Red Onion is known for having dogs,” she told me. She recounted a letter that she received from Kevin, titled “Cry for Help,” that he sent to her while living in the supermax unit. “He said ‘they put us in a gymnasium, had us on our knees, and we were unclothed. And they walked the dogs by us and we couldn’t move.’”
Kevin was released from solitary confinement in 2017, but Snodgrass says that he still suffers from his time in the supermax unit at Red Onion. “He shows clear signs of PTSD, and he has problems with his eyes that he is being treated for today. That’s from the constant light,” she said, referring to the fact that Kevin’s cell was lit by a fluorescent light twenty-four hours per day. “Now that he’s out of solitary confinement, from a mental standpoint, I can see the damage. He’s definitely a different Kevin.”
Despite being home to a notorious supermax facility in Red Onion, Virginia denies that it uses solitary confinement at the highest levels. “It makes me so sad,” said Snodgrass, “Because I voted for governor Northam.” She was heartbroken that the governor maintained the position that the state does not use solitary confinement. “If your leadership puts out the narrative that there’s no solitary confinement, it makes it okay for the Department of Corrections to say the same.” Without the governor’s support, she said, there is no way that the Department of Corrections will change its practices.
I told Snodgrass about my conversations with Jimmy and Matt and asked how she would respond to their claim that solitary confinement is a necessary safety tool. “I sympathize with all corrections officers,” she said, “their job is very difficult. Their job is to maintain order.” She explained that she did not feel that corrections officers were to blame for how they were trained to do their jobs. She acknowledged that solitary confinement may sometimes be necessary for short periods. “We’re talking hours, not days,” she said, sharply.
Snodgrass told me that, in her view, education was the crucial first step in trying to solve the solitary confinement problem in our prison system. “Education about solitary confinement and the damage that can occur will help everyone, especially the guards,” she said. “When you know better, you can do better.”
Though Snodgrass understands the perspective and situation of the guards, her opinion on continuing to use solitary confinement in the United States is emphatic: “It’s an inhumane practice that should be stopped; not regulated, but stopped.”
