Examining Solitary Confinement

The leading Democratic candidates for president in 2020 have at long last agreed that abolishing this atrocity is an essential part of criminal-justice reform. It is up to us to hold them to their words.

When you hear or read the words “solitary confinement,” what images form in your mind?

A naughty inmate spending some time in a kind of “time out” space wearing a hang-dog expression?

A lonely prisoner in a tiny dark cell gazing at light from the slit of a window, with maybe half a bowl of dirty drinking water at his feet?

A mentally ill man who, after 112 consecutive days of solitary, has just severed his penis with a razor and flushed it down his cell’s toilet? 

One of these things is not like the others.

All three images are rooted in the dark dominion of solitary confinement. Only one of them burns through the fog of euphemism and forces a reckoning with a terrible truth—in this case, one of the most perverse, destructive, and unnecessary varieties of soul-murder yet devised by man.

The topic “solitary confinement” has been raised lately (and gingerly, and fleetingly) by several candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination: raised as an agenda item in their calls for repairing the fissures in America’s criminal-justice system. (Criminal-justice reform is tightly intertwined with reform of our negligent systems of mental healthcare in America.)

Dorothea Dix

The candidates have in turn been influenced—inspired—by the efforts of a bright new coalition of mental-health reform advocates: parents, mostly, spurred to action by the death or deep psychosis of a beloved child. Polite yet unyielding, ferociously informed, they amount to a neo-Dorothea Dix approach to getting justice for the dispossessed. 

Iowa is their perfectly chosen beachhead. Not only does the state offer an early concentration of corndog-chewing candidates for them to buttonhole. Iowa City is the home of the turbo-charged advocacy team of Scott and Leslie Carpenter. Armed with an exhaustive five-point bill of particulars for mental healthcare reform compiled by the California advocate DeDe Moon Ranahan, the Carpenters essentially have brought the grass roots onto equal footing with the political elite—on this issue, at least.

But why shine the spotlight on solitary confinement when the justice reform agendas are crowded with so many other “big-ticket” demands? Cutting the U.S. prison population in half comes to mind, as do ending the notorious “cash bail” system that keeps poor young inmates locked up only because they can’t afford otherwise; or tightening up on police oversight; or legalizing marijuana; or abolishing private prisons. 

Here is the reason: I sense that of all these important, difficult-to-achieve goals, the abolishing of solitary is among the easiest to bring up and then dismiss: the one most vulnerable to lip service.

Thomas Edward Silverstein

And that would be a colossal shame. Stuffing sentient human beings into small, dark, fetid enclosures and leaving them there is about the worst thing it is possible to do to one’s fellow man. The American record for duration in solitary was held by a triple murderer named Thomas Silverstein, who died just last May at age 67. He’d spent more than half his life in isolation. 

It borders on the impossible to find shared humanity with a monster like Silverstein. Yet traces of his humanity struggle to declare themselves like green shoots through cracked pavement. “It’s almost more humane to kill someone immediately than it is to intentionally bury a man alive,” he wrote. For one superb writer’s searching attempt, read Pete Earley’s masterful 1992 book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison.

Or return for a moment to the lost soul who severed his penis with a razor. That would be the mentally ill inmate identified by his initials, J.I., a solitary inmate at Broward County Jail in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. On the night of September 2018, jail guards, alerted by prisoners’ shouting in a lockdown unit, rushed to the scene, where they beheld J.I., his hands and forearms bloody, who told them: “I have a real medical emergency. I just cut my penis off and flushed it down the toilet. I have no need for it anymore.”

J.I., who survived, had sat in solitary for 112 consecutive days. He’d been sent there for yelling at staff members. Records showed that guards had been negligent in monitoring his therapeutic needs. [efn_note] A Mentally Ill Man in Solitary Cut Off a Body Part at the Broward County Jail | ACLU of Florida [/efn_note]

Solitary is patently barbaric; bereft of any use (other than convenience and a lust for inflicting psychic pain).  It is a legalized yet likely unconstitutional torture which, I have come to believe, is slightly more heinous even than the death penalty: its victims, while not dead, experience death as their own observers, existing in claustrophobic isolation and silence and darkness and decay, with no definable release awaiting them. 

And so in order to tolerate it as public policy or even as a thought, some self-anesthetizing helps. (Those charged with actually imposing it on human beings presumably develop tougher psychic scar tissue.)  “Solitary confinement” is a term useful for the necessary numbing: an abstraction, one of those “Orwellian” constructions that serve more to camouflage than to evoke their full, and usually terrifying implications. 

That very abstraction is dangerous. It can too easily lead to evaporation.  

This blog, then, is a plea to those presidential candidates who have made the abolition of solitary confinement a part of their criminal-justice reform demands: Do not let this happen. Honor the constituency that has materialized in Iowa and exists throughout the nation. Keep this issue alive. 

In subsequent blogs I will trace the peculiar origins of solitary confinement in America, and will look into some of the lesser-known forms of its use—for example, as an instrument of control for juvenile inmates and even schoolchildren.

I will close this blog with a soaring testimony of hope, resilience, faith, and self-reclamation written by a former criminal and solitary inmate named Thomas Tarrants, and published in the August 19 edition of Christianity Today. [efn_note] I Was a Violent Klansman Who Deserved to Die [/efn_note] It was sent to me by my friend, the literary scholar Harold K. Bush of St. Louis University. Thank you, amigo.

No One [Knows Much] About Crazy People

Well, not “no one.” Still, the levels of ignorance, too often coupled with hostility or sheer meanness, remain unacceptably high in this country. We in what I’ve called “the sub-nation” must never assume that the people we encounter will have even a working knowledge of severe mental illness: not a relative, a next-door neighbor, a caregiver, a police officer, a stranger in the park or on the street–not even the President of the United States.

Below are three recent bits of evidence that prove my point. The first is the text of a Facebook post by Scott Carpenter, a leading reform advocate based in Iowa.

Scott and his wife Leslie, who have seen a family member stricken, are among the strongest voices in America for what needs to be done. Yet not even they are immune from incidents of unexpected and bewildering hatefulness:

“So we’re helping to set things up before a Moms Demand Action Rally in Iowa City.

An elderly man walks [up to me] and says that ‘the problem isn’t about guns. It’s about crazy people.’

Leslie (against my advice to not engage) indicates that we have a son who has a serious mental illness and that he should come listen to he comments in an hour or so. He declined.

Then he said, ‘your son and all of the crazy people should be taken out in a field and shot. That way they could be useful as fertilizer’.

Please don’t ever think that a day of activism is easy.

Scott J. Carpenter”

When you have caught your breath from that, please follow the two links below.

The first link is to some remarks that President Trump made to campaign workers before a political rally in New Hampshire, in which he continues his strange and uninformed characterization of the mentally ill as, collectively, a horde of depraved killers that must be rounded up and swept into asylums. This and other tirades show that Trump knows nothing about insanity and cares less: his real agenda is deflecting attention from the ongoing mass-shooting crisis: The article leaves no doubt about this:

“Trump said many other Republican leaders and the public don’t want ‘insane people, dangerous people, bad people’ owning guns.” 

CNBC.com: Trump says US should build more mental health institutions to combat gun violence: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/16/trump-suggests-more-mental-health-institutions-to-combat-gun-violence.html

The second link offers a rebuke to the president delivered by Angela Kimball, the acting CEO of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“Words matter, Mr. President. ‘These people’ are our friends, neighbors, children, spouses. They’re not ‘monsters,’ ‘the mentally ill’ or ‘crazy people’ – they’re us. Talking about reinstitutionalization only further marginalizes and isolates the one in five people with mental illness. Instead, we need to be talking about the power of early treatment and effective intervention to change lives.”

NAMI.org: NAMI’s Statement Regarding President Trump’s Comments On Reinstitutionalizing People With Mental Illness: https://www.nami.org/About-NAMI/NAMI-News/2019/NAMI-s-Statement-Regarding-President-Trump-s-Comments-on-Reinstitutionalizing-People-with-Mental-Ill

These are but a couple of examples of incidents and attitudes that repeat themselves daily in America. They underscore the urgency of the seminal five-part manifesto organized by advocate Dede Ranahan and made widely available online and to presidential candidates last week. (Ranahan’s mentally ill son Patrick died in an institution in 2014.) The lessons in Ranahan’s great document are many and vital.

What I have outlined above constitutes just one. It is at once tiresomely repetitive and freshly urgent: We can never assume that any given individual–not even our Chief Executive–knows much about crazy people. And we must work relentlessly to change that.

P.S. Mental healthcare advocates Scott and Leslie Carpenter discussed the challenges they experienced when seeking proper care for their son Patrick during an interview with The De Moines Register. What they share is both heartbreaking and informative. I encourage you to take a few moments to watch their interviews below to better understand how mental healthcare policies and procedures often fail to provide effective or compassionate care to the mentally ill.  If you would like to share your own experiences of mental healthcare for yourself or a loved one, I invite you to comment below.

Stories from the front lines of Iowa’s mental health crisis


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