It was the summer of 1988 when a small group of Senators gathered in California to name the newest state prison. It would be one of twenty built over the following two decades but this one was special: it was the state’s first “supermax” designed to house a new “breed” of inmate that other notorious prisons like Folsom and Cochran couldn’t handle.

Close to 300 acres had been acquired for construction near coast, close to the Oregon Border. The “Dungeness Dungeon?” one Senator suggested. Perhaps the “Slammer by the Sea?” another offered.

Ultimately they would decide on Pelican Bay, but the name would be one of the few decisions made by legislators. As Keramet Reiter, a Criminology Professor at the University of California, Irvine wrote in a paper on the topic in 2012, the design of the new supermax was left in the hands of corrections officials who set out to create the ultimate punitive environment.

The Director of Finance for the Department of Corrections in the 1980s, a man named Carl Larson, played a key part in constructing what would become a national model for a new type of prison:

“Larson recalled that the legislature struggled only briefly with the idea that the Pelican Bay design was single-purpose: the prison could never be anything but a supermax, keeping people in total isolation without access to any form of programming, like education or group drug treatment. In the end, Larson said, he simply defended the Pelican Bay supermax to legislators in these terms: ‘It’s not Draconian, it’s Spartan.’”

More than a thousand cells measuring eight-by-ten feet were built out of solid concrete without windows — a detail decided by the architect of the first supermax built in Arizona, to save space.

Several other states followed suit and it wasn’t long before supermax prisons modeled after Pelican Bay sprung up across the country. The shift sparked the attention of Human Rights Watch, which published a report in 1991 calling the trend “the most troubling aspect of the human rights situation in U.S. prisons.”

Still, the Pelican Bay SHU remains one of the harshest prison environments, notorious for its security features. To date, no inmate has escaped and assaults on guards are rare — inmate interaction with them extremely limited.

Five months after the facility opened in 1989 the LA Times ran a story detailing how the prison was designed to keep guards safe. “Pelican Bay is entirely automated and designed so that inmates have virtually no face-to-face contact with guards or other inmates,” reporter Miles Corwin wrote.

“They don’t work in prison industries; they don’t have access to recreation; they don’t mingle with other inmates…They shower alone and exercise alone in miniature yards of barren patches of cement enclosed by 20-feet-high cement walls covered with metal screens. The doors to their cells are opened and closed electronically by a guard in a control booth.”

The “tough on crime” sentiment that had been growing since the 1970s, had now been built directly into the infrastructure of the prison.

Critics were quick to highlight the potential risks to both prisoners and the public, resulting from the psychological trauma that was sure to come out of that degree of isolation — especially for inmates who would eventually be released back into the public.

“I’ve never seen a facility where people are isolated as totally and as completely,” psychology professor Craig Haney told the LA Times in 1990. “It’s unprecedented in modern prisons. The psychological consequences could be severe.”

More than ten years later, in 2003, Haney published a full analysis of the mental health issues stemming from the type of solitary confinement created in supermax prisons. By that point, it was clear that segregation produced serious problems.

During his research conducted at Pelican Bay, he found inmates suffered “anxiety, chronic lethargy, and a very high percentage (70 percent) felt themselves on the verge of an emotional breakdown.” Many couldn’t sleep and experienced nightmares, along with physical symptoms like headaches, trembling, and heart palpitations.

In 2005 mental health experts filed an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court summarizing clinical and research findings on the topic. They concluded that every single study on solitary confinement lasting more than 60 days showed evidence of negative psychological consequences.

Ten years later, in 2015, based on the years worth of research, the United Nations codified standards on the treatment of prisoners that both defined and condemned the use of prolonged solitary confinement. The new “Mandela Rules” require that inmates have access to windows and prohibits segregation for more than 15 consecutive days.

According to a 2015 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, the Federal government and 19 states still hold inmates in isolation indefinitely. There’s limited data on how long inmates spend in solitary in the United States, but state estimates show that often they remain there for years — and sometimes decades.

Despite the new International standards, corrections officials continue to rely on segregation as they try to keep prisons running safely and efficiently with limited resources.

“You gotta keep the predators away from the prey,” Pelican Bay’s warden, Clark Ducart says. “Guys that were out there and were disruptive and preventing programs and preventing the normal operation of the facility — of course once you remove them you can operate normally.”

Ducart has been warden since 2014 but has been at the prison in various roles since it opened in 1989. He says he is supportive of the outcomes agreed to in the settlement and that he is overseeing the implementation of programs that offer incentives for good behavior.

Inmate artwork done by F. Bermúdez

Still, he and many members of his staff are quick to emphasize that the prisoners housed in SHU earned their spot there, and there aren’t any plans to fully put an end to its use. At both the higher levels in the Department of Corrections and on the ground in the prisons, officials don’t even use the word solitary confinement.

“We call it segregated housing,” Ducart explains. “That paints a more accurate picture of what it is. We have segregated you from general population because of your behavior and the fact that you posed a threat to the safety and security of the institution.”

According to a report issued in 2013 by the Government Accountability Office, however, there is no evidence that the use of segregation actually makes prisons safer. The report highlights that within the Bureau of Prisons the segregated population has grown faster than the number in general population, but no assessments have been done to quantify the upsides.

What has been demonstrated is that by using segregation to make prisons safer, officials are actually creating an even bigger problem — especially in regard to public safety.

The negative mental symptoms produced by isolation — including irrational anger, confusion, and extreme social anxiety — often persist even after inmates are released from solitary.

“There is a syndrome of what happens to people when they come out of the SHU, it doesn’t seem to matter whether they go home to the community or they go to a general population prison unit,” says psychiatrist Terry Kupers, who specializes in prisoner treatment and is the author of the upcoming book, Solitary: Supermax Isolation and the Future of Prison Rehabilitation.

While he emphasizes that more research needs to be done to fully understand long-term effects, it’s clear that what he calls “Post-SHU Release Syndrome” severely affects prisoners who have spent time in segregation.

“When we put someone in solitary for a long time, first of all there are the pathological effects of solitary — anxiety, paranoia, the isolating themselves, that kind of thing” he says, adding, “and then there is the lack of social skills and productive skills that they should have been getting.”

In 2014 the ACLU released a briefing paper detailing how mental illnesses created or exacerbated in the SHU follow inmates when they are released into communities, which found that holding inmates in isolation great increased the likelihood that they would commit more violent crimes once they were out of prison.

The report was released one year after inmate Evan Ebel filed a series of grievances with the Colorado Department of Corrections from his segregated cell in the Colorado State Penitentiary, raising concerns about his own release.

He scrawled three messy objections asking the department to rehabilitate him or provide some kind of transition training. He would never be given the assistance he asked for.

As Susan Greene reported in The Colorado Independent in 2013, the 28-year-old, who had been sent to prison on a robbery charge, filed several complaints with the department during his seven-year sentence and when they went unheeded he responded with violence — in one instance attacking a guard — or smearing feces across the concrete wall of his cell.

“Our lives are monotonous enough in CSP where we’re locked down 23 hours a day and basically do the same thing over and over again. The least you could do is give us a little variety of music to listen to so we could leave here with a small degree of our sanity intact,” he wrote at the end of 2006. “Also you continue to take privileges from us for no reason at all and then wonder why we act up. Well here’s your answer. If you could please revert to the old radio station schedule we’d most surely appreciate it. Thanks.”

There were others that detailed problems with his light that would not turn off keeping him up at night, issues with the mail system, and concerns about his laundry going missing. But as his release date crept closer his grievances became less focused and challenged the system itself.

He often voiced fears about his ability to cope after spending years in solitary confinement. He told friends and other prisoners how his struggles to socialize filled him with rage.

“Do you have an obligation to the public to reclimatize ‘dangerous’ inmates to being around other human beings prior to releasing them into society after they have spent years in solitary confinement? If not, why? The remedy I’m requesting is answers to these 3 questions. Thank you.”

He wrote the grievance just weeks before his release. The DOC didn’t respond until after he was free, citing procedural issues with his handwriting.

About two months later, Ebel carjacked and killed pizza delivery man, Nathan Leon. Two days later, dressed in Leon’s uniform, he arrived at the home of Colorado Department of Corrections Executive Director Tom Clements — and shot him as soon as he answered the door.

Ebel was killed during a shootout with police not long after, as he attempted to abscond to Texas. Authorities would later discover an audio recorder with a voice memo that Ebel forced Leon to recite, detailing his motives for the murder:

“In short, you treated us inhumanely, and so we simply seek to do the same, we take (comfort) in the knowledge that we leave your wives without husbands, and your children fatherless. You wanted to play the mad scientist, well they will be your Frankenstein.”