Solitary: The History and Current Reality of Torture as a Means of Social Control Within Prisons

By Joanne Pawlowski

Over 80,000 inmates in US state and federal prisons are currently housed in solitary confinement. Prisoners in solitary spend 23 hours a day in a room the size of a small bathroom. They receive meals through a slot in the cell door and eat alone near an open toilet; the places where they eat, sleep and defecate are only a few feet apart. Life in isolation is characterized by extreme stress, and frequently leads to suicidal behavior. Prisoners refer to solitary as a place where they must struggle to hold onto their minds and their sense of identity, a place where they are treated as something "less than an animal."

Starting with the Quaker origins of solitary confinement in the eighteenth century, this book examines how solitary has been repeatedly viewed as a means of reprogramming the mind, of traumatizing a prisoner into adopting new beliefs.

Solitary argues that CIA "brainwashing" research of the 1950s may have influenced the design of isolation units in American prisons today.

This book also explores the reality of isolated confinement through interviews with women who have been imprisoned in long-term isolation units in New York State. The book reveals special dangers that women face in solitary, including sexual predation by guards.

Solitary is essential reading for specialists, activists, and the general reader alike.

"A pleasure to read, a marvelous book. The book is compelling, measured and steady in its tone, devastating in its ethical condemnation, well-researched, and elegant in its prose style. I think it is brilliant and beautiful." --Elizabeth Berger, psychiatrist and author

Joanne Pawlowski, a writer based in New York City, has worked as a consultant for Human Rights Watch. She is a graduate of Princeton University and has a Master's degree in Public Administration from Harvard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joanne Pawlowski
• Release date: Jan 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301030293

Book preview

Solitary:

The History and Current Reality of Torture

as a Means of Social Control Within Prisons

by

Joanne Pawlowski

Smashwords Edition

*******

Published by:

Joanne Pawlowski on Smashwords

Solitary: The History and Current Reality of Torture as a Means of Social Control Within Prisons, Copyright 2013 by Joanne Pawlowski

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Origins of the Penitentiary and Solitary Confinement

Chapter Two: The CIA's Fascination with Trances

Chapter Three: Stress as a Weapon for Social Change

Chapter Four: Regression as the Goal

Chapter Five: Did MKULTRA Research Influence Prisons?

Chapter Six: An Interview with Dr. Schein

Chapter Seven: Further Experiments

Chapter Eight: Women in Solitary

Resources

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

Maria Rodriguez is a tough woman with the imposing presence of an opera star. She spent three months in solitary confinement in prisons in upstate New York. Like 80,000 other inmates in state and federal prisons who are confined in solitary, she spent 23 hours a day in a room the size of a small bathroom. She received meals from a slot in her cell door and ate alone near an open toilet, as the places where she ate, slept, and defecated were only a few feet apart. She had nothing to do, because prison programs were forbidden to her. She was not allowed contact with her neighbors and had no access to a radio or a TV. She lost an understanding of the time of day because her cell had no natural light cues, and she had no control over the electric light. She was allowed one hour out of her cell for exercise in a cage outdoors with no equipment. She listened to her neighbors in adjoining cells scream and set fires; she overheard one commit suicide.

I don't think I ever did really cope with it, stated Maria, who preferred not to use her real name for this book. Many times I wanted to commit suicide. I don't think that shows any coping skills at all. A person who wants to take their life because they don't want to sit in a room, I don't think that's coping at all. . . at some point you become mentally disoriented, to the point of depression, to the point of posttraumatic stress disorder. She pointed to the cramped office at The Fortune Society (a nonprofit in New York City that offers prisoner reentry programs) in which we were sitting. I mean, try to be in a room this small 23 hours a day with just one hour to breathe and come back in.

While working for the American Friends Service Committee, a humanitarian service organization, I learned about conditions in solitary confinement by reading prisoner letters that had been collected by the AFSC. With the help of nonprofits who offered support services to prisoners reentering society, I later interviewed 13 women who had spent between three months and two years in solitary confinement. Like Maria, most of the women had a brush with suicide while in solitary.

The figure of 80,000 inmates in solitary confinement is an underestimate. It does not cover everyone in high-security supermax units or most prisoners who serve less than a year in isolation, nor does it include prisoners in local jails. Solitary confinement can be found in the US prison system under different names; supermax, administrative segregation, disciplinary segregation, keeplock, and special housing unit (SHU) are commonly used terms.

Typically, prisoners land in isolation either for breaking rules in the prison or because they are considered a threat to other prisoners. They also can be confined in segregation if they need protection from individuals in the general population. Some are confined in solitary if they are merely suspected to be a member of a gang. Others are held in solitary while they await a court trial; they have not yet been convicted of a crime. In the past, prisoners were isolated for short periods of time, but now it is common for a prisoner to be isolated for years. According to a 2006 report by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, prisoners can be punished with time in isolation for trivial offenses such as possessing tobacco or smoking in a non-smoking area. Isolation is often imposed before less expensive punishments are used.

Maria described a relatively new high-tech SHU unit at Albion Correctional Facility for Women in Albion, New York, that had a feature not usually associated with the common picture of prisons: soundproof cells. She explained that in SHU units that had been retrofitted into older prisons, prisoners could flout the conditions of isolation and shout through ventilation ducts to establish some sort of social contact with their neighbors. Such contact had been life-saving in times of personal crisis. At the new prison at Albion, a prison that had been built expressly for solitary confinement, women had no such recourse. So no wonder people are killing themselves, she said.

The idea of a soundproof prison struck me as peculiar. For what purpose does a prison need to be soundproof? And why were women killing themselves in these prisons?

As I researched the subject of solitary confinement, I learned that quite a lot was known about the effects of isolated confinement on the mind. This information (and the question of the soundproof prison) led me to an unusual source: the Central Intelligence Agency, which had spent millions funding research on the psychological effects of solitary confinement. From 1951-1963 the CIA employed prominent psychologists and neuroscientists for MKULTRA, its covert research program in techniques of psychological coercion. (The term MK meant that the program was operated from the technical services division of the agency. ULTRA may refer to the government's ULTRA program during World War II, which decoded Nazi military communications).

According to historian Alfred W. McCoy, MKULTRA had two goals: improved psychological warfare to influence whole societies and better interrogation techniques for targeted individuals. In an attempt to understand the apparent success of Communist methods of brainwashing, MKULTRA researchers came up with a number of ideas about solitary confinement and sensory deprivation (thought to imitate the conditions of solitary confinement). MKULTRA project proposals displayed a fascination with severe stress and with altered states of consciousness. Some of these states, such as trances, are also symptoms of psychological trauma. In 1963, the results of the research were encapsulated in the KUBARK manual (KUBARK being a CIA codename for itself), an interrogation training booklet that was widely used by the agency for decades in Asia and in Central and South America. This research became a basis of programs of torture in these regions, and it informed operations at Abu Ghraib and at Guantanamo.

CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the MKULTRA files burned in 1973. But a small cache of files that partially described 150 research projects (titled Subprojects in the proposals) survived. These documents were obtained by author John Marks through the Freedom of Information Act in the late 1970s. Now declassified, the papers are mostly financial in nature, but they include project proposals that describe some of the content of the program. The documents are heavily redacted; they are thick with black lines that censor text and the information given is fragmentary. But enough is visible to trace ideas that guided these projects.

This research is important because there is evidence in the public record that MKULTRA may have inspired prison authorities to experiment with various forms of solitary confinement over the years, experiments which continue today. This book argues that the CIA may have influenced the design of American isolation units.

This book is a history of solitary confinement. The question that lies behind the story of this book is this: just what was solitary confinement intended to accomplish? In an age where little was known about psychological trauma, solitary's powerful psychological and traumatic effects have made it a unique tool of social control. In the course of two centuries, solitary confinement has been repeatedly viewed as a method of stressing a prisoner to such a degree that his mind would become a blank slate ready for reform or indoctrination, in short, it was seen as a method of reprogramming the mind. The stresses of solitary confinement were thought capable of shocking a prisoner into a new belief system.

After reviewing this history, one might ask: why is this form of confinement, which is known to cause a mental state akin to psychosis, commonly used in American prisons today? The same tool that was used by the CIA to break down prisoners for interrogation, the same tool that was thought to be instrumental in Communist brainwashing is now used routinely in American prisons.

Was the historical purpose of solitary confinement forgotten when its use was radically expanded in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s? The secrecy surrounding the institution of solitary confinement make this question difficult to answer. Today, solitary confinement is often used to house political prisoners. Solitary is also used to warehouse the mentally ill: a high proportion of the inmates in solitary fall into this category. Why is this extreme punishment used on such prisoners?

The first chapter of this book outlines the historical origins of the penitentiary and solitary confinement. It describes how prison reformers based a theory of rehabilitation on solitary's ability to induce mental suffering and severe stress in prisoners. Chapter Two discusses the CIA's interest in trance-like states and brainwashing, and solitary's role in each. Chapter Three describes some of MKULTRA's research into severe stress. Chapter Four discusses one of the results of the stress produced by solitary confinement: regression to an earlier state of psychological development. Chapter Five describes how, according to the public record, MKULTRA research may have been introduced into the US prison system. Chapter Six presents an interview with Dr. Edgar H. Schein, who has been accused by some prisoners of masterminding the use of isolation in US prisons. Chapter Seven discusses the decline of sensory deprivation research. Chapter Eight describes conditions in New York State isolation units and includes interviews with female ex-offenders who have lived in SHUs.

There are only slight differences between the ways different states administer solitary confinement. I view conditions in New York State isolation units as a proxy for those in the rest of the country. Nationwide, 50% of successful suicides that occur in U.S. prisons take place in solitary, even though less than 8% of the prison population is housed there. This degree of suffering inspired the United Nations Committee on Torture to censure the United States for its isolation units (in 2000 and 2006), and the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has called for a complete ban on the practice.

Solitary confinement is now an entrenched institution in which billions of dollars have been invested. Legal attempts to eliminate the practice so far have failed; court decisions in cases that contest conditions in isolation frequently defer to the policies and practices of prison authorities. In early American penitentiaries, there was at least a logic to the use of isolation; it was meant to be a rehabilitative tool. Solitary confinement does not function in this way today. We find ourselves in a strange situation in which a massive prison bureaucracy administers a program of torture whose history and intention no one remembers.

Chapter One

Origins of the Penitentiary and Solitary Confinement

On a hill in Philadelphia, near the center of the city, stands the sullen ruin of Eastern State Penitentiary. Its castle-like facade and grey rocky walls emanate cold and moisture, and the large rough-hewn rocks of which it is built bring to mind the damp and solitude of a rocky coast of an island in a cold sea. Once inside the prison walls, the noise of the city disappears into a deep silence.

The Quakers who built this prison in 1829 went to great lengths to ensure that the prison's architecture would force a prisoner into a relationship with God. Although the white plaster and paint of the corridors are now deteriorating, skylights suffuse the halls with a soft, white, natural light. An understanding and gentle light, it seems. In the original cells, the walls reach high to an oval skylight called a God's Eye. It feels, in these cells, as if the whole sky were looking down on one's every move. Going outside provides no relief from God's scrutiny. Each inmate exercised alone in a courtyard attached to his cell. The courtyards are bounded by high walls that reveal only the sky. No horizon is visible. Again, one feels the heavy weight of observation from above. It is almost dizzying. Prisoners remained isolated in their cells for years; their only communication was to be with the powerful force of God. It was hoped that they would be forced to confront their consciences. Those who created the prison understood that this was torture.

Some say that Eastern State was the first penitentiary. Others would argue the point. In this history of solitary confinement, Eastern State is a starting place for observing how prison reformers regarded solitary as a means of forwarding both mystical and totalitarian aims.

Before the penitentiary was created, before imprisonment was viewed as a punishment in and of itself, prisons in England and the United States were largely holding pens for inmates while they waited to be executed, exiled, or put to hard labor. Conditions in prisons were difficult and unsanitary. Men, women, and sometimes children were held in together in common rooms