Solitary confinement

Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an inmate is isolated from any human contact.

Quotes

• Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.
  • Noam Chomsky [1]

• We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
  • Doris Lessing Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"

• I have come to this conclusion: the aim of solitary confinement is brain-washing, so that prisoners, deprived of normal living conditions, lose their unique human characteristics, their train of thought and ideas, and their physical and psychological health.
  • Narges Mohammadi, letter written during her imprisonment at the Evin Prison, 2018. [2]

• Les objets extérieurs ont une action réelle sur le cerveau. Qui s’enferme entre quatre murs finit par perdre la faculté d’associer les idées et les mots. Que de prisonniers cellulaires devenus imbéciles, sinon fous, par le défaut d’exercice des facultés pensantes.
  • External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!
    • Jules Verne, Ch. XXVI: The worst peril of all

• I woke up with the same thought: will this be the day? Will this be the day I lose my sanity and discipline? Will I start screaming and never stop?
  • Albert Woodfox on his experience in solitary confinement, written in his book Solitary, published after his forty year imprisonment, as quoted in the Vox article "The case against solitary confinement"

• The United States is a nation of second chances, but the experience of solitary confinement too often undercuts that second chance. Those who do make it out often have trouble holding down jobs, reuniting with family and becoming productive members of society. Imagine having served your time and then being unable to hand change over to a customer or look your wife in the eye or hug your children.
  • President Barack Obama in Barack Obama: Why we must rethink solitary confinement'', a 2016 Op-Ed for the Washington Post.

See also

• Crime
• Prison
• Punishment
• Torture

External links

• Solitary Watch
• Sourcebook on solitary confinement
• Dr. Atul Gawande: Solitary Confinement is Torture – video report by Democracy Now!
• Shane Bauer: "Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons" (November/December 2012), Mother Jones
• Women in Solitary Confinement (2015-01-18), Victoria Law, Truthout
• ACLU report documents horror of solitary confinement in US prisons. World Socialist Web Site. 20 February 2015
• 6×9: A virtual experience of solitary confinement. The Guardian.