I asked him what he meant. “Anywhere. A restaurant, going to mass with my fiancee. Everywhere. It used to be I had to see everything and everyone where I was or I couldn’t be in any public place.”

Lacey’s been out of prison for seven years now: “It’s only been the last few years that I’ve been able to sit in a chair that isn’t in the corner of the room furthest from the door and with my back to the wall.”

By the time he was released, he had developed a secondary personality. I asked him to describe as best he could what that alternate version of him was. He said, “It’s like, uh, a body guard or security guard. He watches every corner of the room and is always aware of 100 percent of his surroundings.”

Initially not knowing how long he’d be in “the hole” he said he began rehearsing what he would do if he was attacked when he got out. Days passed, then months, then several years went by. Each day, every hour… every few minutes even, his mind would re-visit the same defensive moves over, and over, and over again. He kept track of the time between his meals and the hours until his mandated 1 hour walk in a 3-foot-by-8-foot cage for “recreational” time — again, by himself.

I took one of my employees to lunch several months ago. He spent from age 20 through his 27th birthday in solitary confinement. I asked him over our meal, “What was it like to be alone for that long?”

Psychiatrists and psychologists who have spent decades studying exactly this have never been able to articulate the damage accurately. They say it’s too extensive to quantitate and exponentially lowers the possibility of successful rehabilitation in the future.

In a study of inmates at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison , psychologist Craig Haney found that prisoners “lose the ability to initiate or to control their own behavior, or to organize their own lives.” Haney, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, attributed this loss to the near total lack of control that prisoners have over their day-to-day lives in solitary.

A 2003 report by Human Rights Watch found that anywhere from one-fifth to two-thirds of prisoners in solitary confinement are believed to have some form of mental illness. That’s 20 percent to 30 percent.

In one notorious study from the 1950s, University of Wisconsin psychologist Harry Harlow placed rhesus monkeys inside a custom-designed solitary chamber nicknamed “the pit of despair.” After a day or two, Harlow wrote, “most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless.” Harlow also found that monkeys kept in isolation wound up “profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.” Most re-adjusted eventually, but not those that had been caged the longest. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow found.

In 1951, researchers at McGill University paid a group of male graduate students to stay in small chambers equipped with only a bed for an experiment on sensory deprivation. They could leave to use the bathroom, but that’s all. They wore goggles and earphones to limit their sense of sight and hearing, and gloves to limit their sense of touch. The plan was to observe students for six weeks, but not one lasted more than seven days. Nearly every student lost the ability “to think clearly about anything for any length of time,” while several others began to suffer hallucinations. “One man could see nothing but dogs,” wrote one of the study’s collaborators, “another nothing but eyeglasses of various types, and so on.”

In May 2015, the prison population in Arkansas had exceeded 18,000 inmates housed in both Arkansas Department of Correction facilities and the county jail back-up. Take a look at the Arkansas prison population growth chart below.

The following is from a report commissioned by ADC and can be found on their website:

“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Arkansas’ incarceration rate in 2013, 578 prisoners per 100,000 state residents, exceeded the national rate of 417. It is important to note that the national incarceration rate used for this report is based on offenders held in state prisons only and does not include federal prisoners or persons held in jails.”

Then in September 2015, a report was released by Yale University in cooperation with the Association of State Correctional Administrators that showed Arkansas has the highest percentage of male inmates in solitary confinement in the country — 7.5 percent of the Arkansas’ nearly 14,000 male inmates are held in “administrative segregation,” or in isolation, for 22 to 23 hours a day for 30 days or more.

What Value Does Solitary Confinement Have for Our Justice System?

This is when we have to ask ourselves the question: What value does solitary confinement have for our justice system? If the corrections department is to correct behavior, what role does irreparable damage have in correcting undesirable behaviors? I would venture to say the majority of educated adults if pushed to answer this question would concede it shouldn’t play a role. Most would be hard-pressed to find an alternative to disciplinary action for violent individuals, however.

Below are a few points from a report titled, “Mississippi’s Experience Rethinking Prison Classification and Creating Alternative Mental Health Programs.”

The development of an objective criteria for placement in administrative segregation (solitary confinement)

A mandate that prisoners in Mississippi may be held in administrative segregation only if they have committed serious infractions, are active high-level members of a gang or have prior escapes or escape attempts from a secure facility

A process mandating a 90-day review for all prisoners in administrative segregation and a written case plan for each prisoner specifying what he/she must do to gain release from administrative segregation.

The creation of a step-down unit for those prisoners in need of mental health facilities which would function alongside the Mississippi Department of Corrections

What you see here is that Mississippi developed a system of intentionality that is critically absent among so many correctional systems. Reform has to come from the decision to implement change, which is what they did so their prison population was no longer tortured and left mangled by the devastation solitary confinement inevitably brings on any human subjected to it’s unforgiving punishment. Here is a link to that article.

Lukas Muntingh, co-founder of the Civil Society Prison Reform Initiative writes:

“The way prisoners are treated, and their experience of their rights, shape and reflect on constructs of offenders, punishment, use of force, dignity and the duty of the state to provide care. These constructs are not static; they are continuously moulded and reshaped by the current discourse. This fluidity cannot be left unchecked in a constitutional democracy.”

This is taken straight from the Arkansas Department of Correction Administrative Directive issued on Jan. 17, 2014:

“D. Review of Administrative Segregation – Status 1.

The Classification Committee or authorized staff must review the status of every inmate assigned to administrative segregation classification every seven (7) days for the first two months, and every thirty (30) days thereafter to determine if the reason(s) for placement continue to exist. At every other, of these 30-day reviews, the inmate will be personally interviewed by the Classification Committee or authorized staff. All reviews will be documented utilizing the appropriate segregation form.”

Unfortunately this neither answers to the power of nor minimizes the uses of solitary confinement effectively enough. One study from the American Journal of Public Health, found that “inmates ever assigned to solitary confinement were 3.2 times as likely to commit an act of self-harm per 1000 days at some time during their incarceration as those never assigned to solitary.”

Arkansas needs tighter restrictions, more oversight and specific rules for the application of solitary confinement in our state’s prison and jail system. We cannot continue this practice as freely as we have done and continue to do to this day.