You jolt awake from a disturbed sleep, your body dripping with sweat. You don’t know how much time has passed — minutes, hours, perhaps even days. But you feel frightened, and your heart is racing. You had a nightmare. You were in a dark, narrow, endless hallway. You were chasing a young man, shouting to him, but no sound came out. You had to warn him of something — you don’t know what. He stopped walking and slowly turned around. You noticed his shoes, the tattoos on his arms. He was you — a younger you. His body was filled out, healthy, like yours used to be. His wrists weren’t shackled. But you couldn’t quite make out his face. You inched closer, squinting. But he had no face at all; there was just a blank blur. He did not recognize you, either. He turned back around and kept walking.
That’s when you woke. Now tears are coming down your face. Maybe it wasn’t even a nightmare. In fact, you might’ve not been asleep at all.
This is your existence in “the box.” You live in your brain, inside a cage, inside a penitentiary — a prison within a prison within a prison. The cell itself is smaller than 8 feet by 10 feet, about the size of a bathroom. It’s impossible to walk more than a few steps in any direction. You’ve paced it hundreds of times, counting five tiles per step. You’ve memorized those dirty, cold tiles: every crack, every imperfect angle. You’ve studied them backwards, forwards and sideways. Sometimes you watch the cracks deepen, bend, or shift. Occasionally a roach or a mouse scurries past. You like when they do … a life to watch, something to talk to.
Above is a low ceiling. Around you: three concrete walls. The dark grey paint is chipping away, revealing traces of past occupants — the stains of old graffiti, carvings of initials and marks where fingernails once scratched, scraped, dragged and dug. Then there’s the door: a heavy slab of steel. It never opens.
Thus completes the anatomy of the hole in which you dwell, the cage that contains you, the chamber that chokes you.
There is no window; there is no clock. The artificial light is on at all times. You don’t know what time it is, what day or month it is. Time can stretch into endless vacuity, collapse abruptly, or warp into itself — a nasty little trick…
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There is a common misconception that solitary is strictly reserved for violent felons who are a danger to other inmates. But it’s actually being widely overused as a punishment for minor disciplinary violations while in prison, such as ignoring orders or using profanity. In New York, there are almost 4,000 inmates in solitary, mainly for disciplinary infractions.
The 2000 census estimated that there were over 81,000 inmates in some form of isolation in the U.S. — roughly the total number of all prisoners in the whole of the U.K. This number does not include juvenile facilities, immigrant detention centers or local jails. People in solitary confinement constitute 7% of all federal inmates. One-third to one-half is mentally ill, and a disproportionate number are minorities.
Prolonged isolation causes severe mental and neurological damage. Humans are fundamentally and intrinsically social beings. We depend upon each other and rely on interaction in order to function normally and identify and place ourselves in the world. The New Republic wrote, “Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a new slew of other systems out of whack.” They noted that emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking is. Brain scans reveal that people without sustained social interaction have become as impaired as people who had incurred traumatic brain injury…
To read the rest of Dimon’s article, visit Policy Mic.
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty
