Effects of Solitary Confinement

Last night National Geographic aired a disturbing one hour program on the psychological effects of solitary confinement. I found it disturbing to watch. I made it through half the program, then turned it off and decided I would rather read about it than actually see it.

The program focused on inmates at Colorado Correctional, a prison of over 600 men, each in solitary confinement. Each prisoner has a private room, probably about 6X8feet, with a bed, sink, desk and toilet. That's it. No television or radio. The rooms they showed all had a window (way up high). They are confined to their room for 23 hours a day. They have one hour of solitary exercise in a gym and 15 minutes shower time. They have no human contact. Their meals are delivered through a slot in the wall. Some of these men have been there for years!!! Just thinking about that makes me angry. Apparently we are one of the only countries still using solitary confinement as a form of punishment. So let's see why they're in solitary.

Many of the prisoners are there because they are a danger to other inmates or to themselves. They act out and are violent. The method used to control them is to take everything away from them, then have them earn back privileges, like reading material or television. If they screw up at all, they go back to square one and that's why so many of them have been in solitary for so long. Prison officials maintain that they isolate them to protect the regular prison population from violent criminals. Sounds reasonable, but at what cost?

Dr. Stuart Grassian is an expert on the psychiatric effects of solitary and he lists a variety of behaviors that inmates in solitary may exhibit. Panic attacks, difficulty thinking, concentrating and memory, obsessional thoughts, primitive agressive fantasies, overt paranoia, problems with impulse control and hallucinations. These are not the behaviors you want to see in someone you are trying to rehabilitate.

I understand that violent criminals need to be segrated from the population, but I suspect there are other ways to deal with many of the prisoners. Apparently there are court cases waiting to be heard that may determine whether solitary confinement is constitutional. We'll have to wait and see. In the mean time, we need to know that prisoners that are being housed in what they politely call "administrative segregation" are not getting better, in fact quite the opposite. They are simply being housed, and many of these prisoners develop severe mental illness over the course of their incarceration. It just seems to me with what we know today about the human psyche there must be another way to deal with many of these prisoners. It seems to me, a lay person in the area of prison reform, that alternative ways of incarcerating violent criminals is something that should be examined. Just a thought.