WASHINGTON—The prisoner, a man in his 20s, spent a year in solitary confinement. Then he was given a new punishment: a second year in solitary. He had committed another offence.

The offence, according to a Buddhist chaplain who knows him, was a suicide attempt.

“They charged him with disobeying a direct order, which was basically a direct order to stop trying to hang himself,” says Rev. Kate Edwards, who counselled inmates in Wisconsin prisons between 2009 and 2014.

“And because he fought with the officers when they were cutting him down — because he was upset enough to be trying to kill himself — they charged him with fighting with an officer and resisting an officer. And sentenced him to another year in solitary.”

The episode turned Edwards into an activist for solitary reform. This week, she experienced one of her periodic moments of despair. Kalief Browder, another young man who attempted suicide during two years in solitary, was dead at 22.

At 16, Browder was sent to New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail to await trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. The charges were dropped in 2013. By then, Browder had spent three years at Rikers. He killed himself on Saturday — unable, his family said, to overcome “pain and torment which emanated from his experiences in solitary confinement.”

The use of solitary in U.S. prisons and jails has skyrocketed along with the broader inmate population since the 1980s. The Browder case, publicized by the New Yorker magazine, had helped galvanize a pushback movement that barely existed a decade ago.

The reformers made noteworthy gains last year, winning an unprecedented number of improvements in states around the country. But they have not yet managed anything close to an overhaul of a practice they describe as barbaric, expensive and grossly overused.

The U.S. has at least 80,000 people in solitary at any one time. Most of them are kept in a bare cell for 22 or 23 hours a day, handed meals through a slot in a steel door, and denied human contact even during one-hour exercise periods.

Prolonged isolation can wreak havoc on the brain, worsening or creating mental health problems like anxiety and hallucinations. The United Nations has called for a ban on solitary of more than 15 consecutive days, saying isolation longer than that can constitute torture. Thousands of U.S. prisoners are held in solitary for months or years.

“Having been in prison, I understand that you have to, at times, be able to isolate people to protect them. And I also understand you have to isolate people sometimes to punish them. But they do too much of it here,” says acclaimed writer Wilbert Rideau, 73, who spent 12 years in solitary on Louisiana’s death row in the 1960s and 1970s. “They do it here at a level that’s just extreme. And what they do ultimately results in needless torture, misery, suffering and death.”

Two days after Browder’s death, a federal judge ordered the release of Albert Woodfox, the last imprisoned member of Louisiana’s “Angola Three.” Woodfox, 68, has been in solitary for 43 years — though his two convictions for the murder of a prison guard in 1972 were both overturned. Louisiana is appealing the judge’s order.

“Over four decades in a cell smaller than your bathroom at home,” says Rideau, who was at the Angola prison with Woodfox. “The worst thing you will ever do to a human being, in my opinion, is to isolate him, make him live totally alone, cut off from the rest of the world. That’s the cruellest thing one human can do to another.”

New York City last year banned solitary for inmates 21 and under. Arizona, sued by civil liberties advocates, agreed to let inmates with serious mental illnesses spend more time outside their segregated cells. The corrections chiefs of Colorado and New Mexico subjected themselves to isolation. States as varied as California and Montana are considering bills to impose statewide bans on solitary for young people.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul, a presidential candidate, regularly cites Browder’s case on the campaign trail. And Paul and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker have introduced a federal bill to curtail youth solitary.

“On days where I read about Kalief Browder’s suicide, I feel pretty hopeless. But on other days, I feel like the conversation is changing nationally,” Edwards says.

James Ridgeway, co-founder of the group Solitary Watch, says policy changes to date have done nothing for most of the 80,000 segregated prisoners. While solitary is now the subject of high-profile debate, he says, reforms have targeted only “low-hanging fruit” like the isolation of teenagers and people with severe illnesses.

“You could speculate that there are some modest efforts at change,” Ridgeway says. “You couldn’t possible say that there is change.”

Rideau follows the debate from his Louisiana home. He was imprisoned for 44 years before his controversial murder conviction, for killing a bank employee during a 1961 robbery, was reduced to manslaughter in 2005.

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His own years in solitary were productive. He read exhaustively, teaching himself enough to become a renowned prison journalist. He says he would not have survived in Angola’s general population as a skinny and ignorant teenager. He has been described since the 1990s as “the most rehabilitated prisoner in America.”

But he says his story should not be used as proof that solitary works.

“For every guy like me, I can tell you some other guys who committed suicide. Guys who had to be sent to a mental institution. Guys who were finally released from solitary and sent out to general population and were made sex slaves,” he says. “Because they couldn’t handle it.”