The horrors of solitary confinement.

AuthorLueders, Bill

These were men Kate Edwards knew well. They had attended the spiritual talking circles she ran as a Buddhist chaplain in Wisconsin prisons. Some of them ended up in solitary confinement.

"They would start to change in disturbing ways," recalls Edwards, who continued to have contact with several of these inmates--now through a glass partition, as they sat with handcuffs and leg shackles. "They became unkempt, less able to focus. As the weeks went by, they would look more and more distressed. I was watching them disintegrate."

One man she knew stopped eating. Another, while serving a maximum 360-day term in solitary, attempted suicide. In response, she says, he was punished with an additional 360 days in the hole.

Edwards, a member of a faith-based prisoner advocacy group called Wisdom, helped write a report on the use of solitary confinement in Wisconsin. The group has used a life-sized replica of a six-by-twelve-foot solitary cell, with a recording of the deafening racket made by prisoners within an actual solitary unit, to drive home the harsh realities of this form of incarceration to thousands of people, in churches and public places. (A national group in Washington, D.C., has made its own replica.)

It's been a lonely battle, with intractable bureaucracies on one side and a largely indifferent public on the other. But now, at long last, there are hopeful signs.

"Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years, at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That is not going to make us stronger. And if those individuals are ultimately released, how are they ever going to adapt?"

These words were spoken in mid-July by President Obama, at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia. They echo remarks made in March by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who flatly declared: "Solitary confinement literally drives men mad."

Of course it does. This has been known for years. Inmates in solitary are locked down in tiny cells, with nothing to do. They face crushing depression and anxiety. They scream and cry. They slash and bite their own flesh. They smear feces on the walls. They try to kill themselves with pens, with paper clips, with bed sheets, with the metal from their glasses. If they survive, they are often punished some more.

Amnesty International calls the way solitary is used in the United States "a breach of international law." A United Nations...

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