2012
Solitary Confinement Is Torture
Solitary confinement is torture.
First, an extreme case of an accidental, 4-day solitary confinement without water.
[As] the days dragged on, the terrifying realization set in that he was trapped. He had been forgotten in a 5-by-10-foot windowless room, hearing only the muffled sounds of voices and toilets flushing in the Drug Enforcement Administration facility in San Diego.
On the third day, he began to hallucinate. He urinated on a metal bench to be able to drink his urine. He stacked a blanket, his pants and shoes on the bench and tried to reach an overhead fire sprinkler, futilely swatting at it with his cuffed hands to set it off.
Then, the engineering student says he gave up and accepted death. He bit into his eyeglasses to break them. He says he used a shard of glass to carve “Sorry Mom” onto his arm so he could leave something for her.
Let’s concede right away this man’s experience was far worse than that of a “typical” solitary prisoner, who wouldn’t normally be denied things like water, food, toilet access, and certainty of release. (I mean, you know, unless you’re a “terror suspect”. Those guys hate puppies and eat babies!)
But ask yourself: would you rather spend 30 days in solitary or be whipped a dozen times? My bet is even if you think you prefer solitary, you’d change your mind after experiencing them both, and being able to compare: Wikipedia | Solitary Confinement: Criticism
Ironically, whipping prisoners is considered inhumane, while solitary confinement is tolerated as if it were just “grown-up time out”.
I think our bias stems from the vivid imagery. When we imagine being whipped, we imagine immense pain, streaks of blood, and screams of agony. We partly experience it ourselves. When we imagine solitary confinement, we see a person, alone in a quiet cell, waiting for release. For most of us, “intense loneliness” is the nearest related thing in our empathy portfolio. If imagining a whipping is like smelling strawberries without eating them, then imagining sustained, solitary confinement is like smelling a strawberry plant that won’t bear fruit for another month.
Since our imagination is better at conjuring up a brief experience of agony than it is at emulating the hour-by-hour, mounting horror of isolation, we choose to “spare” our prisoners the cruelty of the whip, so we can put them through a quiet hell that lets us sleep better.
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