Solitary confinement is a penal practice that has a long and complex history in America. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the United States’ system of punishment for criminals was largely inherited from Europe. The system was based upon corporal and capital punishment: “Before independence, Americans generally flogged, branded or mutilated those felons they did not hang. Except for debtors and such minor miscreants as vagrants and drunkards, people were held behind bars only to await trial or punishment, and not as punishment.”[1] The use of incarceration as a form punishment began in 1682, when William Penn founded the province of Pennsylvania.[2] Penn instituted a criminal code that featured imprisonment, labor, fines and forfeiture in the place of punishments like branding, the stocks and death. In the years after independence prisons gained much support. In theory, they were meant to deter criminals, as well as rehabilitate them by allowing “prisoners to engage in penitent reflection.”[3] By the early 19th century, two dominant methods of imprisonment had arisen: the Pennsylvania system and the Auburn system.
The Pennsylvania system originated in 1790 at the Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia, and was later instituted throughout Pennsylvania, notably in the large Western and Eastern State Penitentiaries. Prisoners were locked into single cells alone with a Bible, and were allowed to engage in manual labor (e.g. carpentry, weaving, shoemaking and tailoring) within their cells.[4] The Auburn system was developed at its eponymous prison in New York. The new system came about after Auburn prison had attempted to institute a modified version of the Pennsylvania system, where inmates were not allowed to work.[5] The results were disastrous. Gershom Powers, the superintendent of the prison, observed that, “a number of the convicts became insane while in solitude; one was so desperate that he…threw himself from the gallery upon the pavement, which nearly killed him…another beat and mangled his head against the walls of his cell until he destroyed one of his eyes.”[6] In contrast to the Pennsylvania system, the Auburn system allowed prisoners to work and eat together during the day, though silence was strictly enforced. The Auburn system soon became the dominant form of incarceration in the United States; it drove less men mad than the Pennsylvania system and produced more goods that states could sell.
By the late 19th century though, the Auburn system had fallen out of favor. The system entailed the liberal use of flogging, and was marked by other ignominious practices, like forcing inmates to march in lockstep (with their arms locked to the inmate in front of them). These inhumane aspects led to its unpopularity and eventual reform. America’s distaste for the Auburn system and solitary confinement in general is powerfully demonstrated by In re Medley, a case that the Supreme Court decided in 1890. In Medley, a man convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death challenged the legality of his punishment. Colorado had passed a new law governing the treatment of people who were about to be executed after Medley had murdered his wife, but Medley was still punished according to the new law. The new statute differed from the older one in a number of ways, most notably in that the criminal was held in solitary confinement before the execution. The Supreme Court found that this constituted substantial additional punishment, hence Medley had been subjected to an ex post facto law, and they set him free. In the majority opinion, Samuel Miller reflects briefly on the use of solitary confinement in America:
But experience demonstrated that there were serious objections to it [solitary confinement]. 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; while 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.[7]
In Medley, the Supreme Court recognized solitary confinement for what it is: an incredibly harsh punishment that causes dramatic mental suffering and damage, and serves almost no penological purpose.
From the late 19th century until the 1970s solitary confinement was not used as widely or constantly as it is today. This all changed in the mid-70s with the passage of harsh laws concerning the possession and use of drugs and mandatory sentencing statutes, as well as a distinct shift in penal philosophy away from rehabilitation towards retribution and warehousing.[8] These changes led to overcrowded prisons and a lack of positive incentives (i.e. educational and vocational programming) with which to influence inmates’ behavior. Craig Haney observes, “In systems whose raison d’etre was punishment, it was not surprising that correctional officials turned to punitive mechanisms in the hope of buttressing increasingly tenuous institutional controls.”[9] Solitary confinement became one of administrators’ main tools for influencing and controlling inmate behavior. Isolation is certainly a punishment that can deter infractions, but beyond that it has become a behavior management strategy. Instead of working to rehabilitate inmates and attempting to change them, penitentiaries can now simply lock up troublesome prisoners and forget about them.
This trend is most clearly illustrated by the appearance of a new penal institution: the supermax prison. The supermax system began in October 1983, when two guards were killed at Illinois’ Marion Penitentiary and the entire prison was put on lockdown. Inmates were simply shut in their cells and all communal activities were abolished. The lockdown was never lifted. The growth of supermax prisons has been staggering. As of 2006, there are “at least 57 supermax prisons that house approximately 20,000 inmates.”[10] It is important to note that the vast majority of maximum-security prisons have their own segregation units where inmates are subjected to much the same treatment that a prisoner in a supermax prison would experience.
The circumstances of incarceration in modern supermax prisons and segregation units are shocking. Peter Smith writes,
[C]onditions typically include solitary confinement twenty-three hours each day in a barren environment, under constant high-tech surveillance. Inmates are sometimes able to shout to each other but otherwise have no social contact…Communication with the outside world is minimal. Visits and phone calls are infrequent and are severely restricted if allowed at all…The physical contact available to an inmate…may for several years ‘be limited to being touched through a security door by a correctional officer while being placed in restraints or having restraints removed.’ These facilities typically claim to operate a regime of behavior modification, but most provide few program activities such as work or education.[11]
Later in this article I will expound more fully on the physical conditions of solitary confinement, as well as its psychological effects. Suffice it to say here that this sort of isolation, experienced over a long period of time, cannot fail to produce mental distress, resulting in neurosis and even psychosis. It is also important to bear in mind that isolation is often not the only ordeal that prisoners must weather while in solitary confinement. Verbal and physical abuse, cleanliness of the facilities and inadequate medical care are only a few of the other hardships of prison.
[1] Kunen, James S. “Teaching Prisoners a Lesson.” In The New Yorker, July 10, 1995, p.35.
[2] Lewis, Orlando Faulkland. The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs. P.10
[3] Conover, Ted. Newjack. New York: Random House, 2000. P. 173
[4] Lewis, 30
[5] Conover, 173
[6] From Powers, Gershom. General Description of Auburn Prison, 83. Found in Lewis, 82.
[7] In re Medley, http://supreme.vlex.com/vid/in-re-medley-20057606
[8] Haney, Craig. “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement.” In Crime Delinquency, 2003, 128
[9] Ibid, 128
[10] Mears, Daniel P. and Watson, Jamie. “Towards a Fair and Balanced Assessment of Supermax Prisons.” In Justice Quarterly, Volume 23, Number 2, June 2006. P. 232.
[11] Smith, Peter Scharff, “The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates: A Brief History and Review of the Literature.” In Crime and Justice, 2.
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