Prison is the one place in the world where you can’t get kicked out for bad behavior. Instead, you get kicked in. To solitary confinement. Except that might not be the case anymore after Barack Obama’s historic humanitarian move yesterday of banning solitary confinement for juveniles and for low-level offenders in the federal prison system.



In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Obama noted that inhabitants of solitary confinement decompensate mentally because of the conditions, sometimes so severely that it affects their re-entry into society once they go home. He is right.



Solitary confinement is impeccable psychological torture. I remember that, mere minutes after being in solitary confinement at York Correctional Institution, my emotions would divebomb. The conditions – the tedium, the prison FOMO and the inability to change clothes more than once a week – are that brutal.

Because solitary confinement is so bad, little jaunts out of the Restricted Housing Unit are tantamount to vacations. When guards took me to a meeting with an attorney or to speak with prison administration, I was hardly welcomed by the general population; prisoners in solitary (or “seg” as we called it) cannot interact with other prisoners. Other inmates are sometimes asked to turn toward a wall so that they can’t make eye contact with someone in segregation as she is escorted past in shackles and cuffs. Confinement just isn’t solitary if you have any contact with other people.

Still, I longed for those trips out of “seg”. To walk in a straight line instead of pacing in tiny circles, to sit in a chair, even as a defendant, to wear clean civilian clothes around people who weren’t correctional officers is practically paradise.



The number of suicides in that type of correctional housing bear this out: half of all suicides behind bars occur in solitary confinement even though inmates in segregation account for only 5% of the entire incarcerated population. Of all the studies examining the effects of extreme isolation of prisoners, only one claimed that segregation was not damaging to a person’s psyche and social ability. Critics of that study attribute these results to the fact that the subjects were just so happy to be out of their cells for the research interview that their temporary joy masked any psychological distress.

There’s no research specific to the timing of segregation suicides, whether they occur after time spent out of the cell, but I would guess that many suicides in solitary happen after the person gets a taste of humanity, a moment out of seclusion, only to have it fade at the threshold of their 9x12, freezing cell. It’s bad enough to go to the hole. Going back to the hole is worse.



The glimpse of something better is supposed to be a great motivator for people. But it only works if that something better is actually attainable. If it’s not, then all it does is highlight your decline in a violent neon, define your abjectness and refine the boundaries that separate you from emotional regulation.

In theory, the lack of contact and activity of solitary confinement should be the perfect canvas for zen’s artistry. After all, the only thing a prisoner in solitary confinement needs to do is to be. But peace doesn’t follow this type of emptying. Instead, your mind goes through death throes and your thoughts develop a viciousness that you can’t express by being. You have to do something. And that’s when prisoners take their own lives in solitary confinement.



I never got to that point, and not because I’m strong. My mind was gelatin; establishing a firm plan on it would have been impossible. But for many others, that is not the case. Let us hope that Obama’s new regulation will mean fewer people behind bars reach those levels of despair in the first place.

• In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 90. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.