There are tens of thousands of people in solitary confinement all around the world. There may even be a prison using it not far away from where you are right now. And the experiences of prisoners in solitary are completely changing how we think about the human mind. [Music] Part one: all alone For a long time people in the Western philosophical tradition have said that human minds are separate. 100 percent discrete individuals, sealed-off units. You can find ideas like this in thinkers like Rene Descartes, or Zera Yacob. Even Aristotle who said man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others Thought that human beings were separate from each other and the world. We enjoy socializing, need socializing maybe, but still there's that gap. I'm not gonna get too deep into this today, but that model of the individual self isolated from others? It's the theory of mind that capitalism assumes. And it was part of what inspired a lot of early proponents of solitary confinement. Take somebody who's done wrong, seal them away somewhere where they can reflect have a chat with their ideal self and hopefully come out better. It almost sounds humane! More humane at least than Thumbscrews, or burning them in public, or executions. Surely. It's difficult to know exactly how many people are being held in solitary confinement today. In the United States, all the estimates I've seen are measured in tens of thousands, but Disagreements about definitions as well as changing definitions and policies and court decisions Reporting and recording errors and different counting procedures have led to a lack of reliable and valid data on supermax issues. Also, sometimes people are subjected to what looks an awful lot like solitary confinement, but isn't officially called that. They call it the secure housing unit, or the control unit, or preventative detention. In my country, the Department of Justice has said that we don't do solitary confinement. And yet a report in 2017 by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of prisons said that not only are we doing it, we're even doing it to children. However many people are being held in solitary though and whatever its legal definition, In her book Solitary Confinement falsely professor Lisa Guenther argues that they almost Invariably don't come out better. They are harmed by the experience Of course as well as a general unpleasantness of being locked up, they can also hallucinate, Become disoriented, distressed, depressed, anxious, psychotic, suicidal even. But even beyond that, Human beings kept in solitary can actually lose their minds, and their ability to interpret their own experiences. There are many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. They see things that do not exist, and they fail to see things that do. Their sense of their own bodies Even the fundamental capacity to feel pain and distinguish their own pain from that of others Erodes to the point where they're no longer sure if they're being harmed or harming themselves. And Guenther says that's because we've been wrong about minds all this time. We're not actually discrete individuals, at least not as much as we thought. We're a network. We're not a hive mind, obviously. But if we were 100 percent separate, Then we wouldn't expect solitary to completely destroy somebody's capacity for meaningful experience in quite the way that it can. She says in order to explain what it does to a human being, we're gonna need an entirely new theory of mind. Part two: phenomenology Guenther begins with the testimony of survivors of solitary confinement. So let's hear some. Now be warned, they are a little bit disturbing, but have a listen and see what you can spot. Here are the words of Jack Henry Abbott who was imprisoned in solitary confinement and complete darkness. I heard someone screaming far away And it was me. I fell against the wall and, as if it were a catapult, was hurled across the cell to the opposite wall back and forth I reeled from the door to the walls Screaming. Insane. That was after only twenty three days. Here's some more from prisoners in Walpole prison in Massachusetts. The shortest term was 11 days the longest 10 months. I seem to see movements real fast motions in front of me and then it seems like they're doing the thing behind your back Can't quite see them. Did someone just hit me? I dwell on it for hours. Melting. Everything in the cell starts moving. Everything gets darker you feel like you're losing your vision. I can't concentrate, can't read. Your mind's narcotized. Sometimes can't grasp words in my mind that I know. Get stuck have to think of another word Memory is going. You feel you are losing something you might not get back. And finally, the words of Robert King, a Black Panther who was imprisoned in a cell 6 foot by 9 foot For a murder he didn't commit for 29 years and lived. When I walked out of Angola, I didn't realize how permanently the experience of solitary would mark me. Even now my sight is impaired. I find it very difficult to judge long distances, a result of living in such a small space. Emotionally, too, I found it hard to move on. I talk about my 29 years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it never leaves you. In some ways I am still there. What is it about living in a static, unchanging world without other people, That causes these kinds of experiences? And remember, these are just the people who got out and are able to talk about it. There'd be others who could tell us a lot more about solitary if only they were in a state to. But that, I am forbid to tell, the secrets of my prison-house I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. To account for these experiences Guenther draws on a tradition in philosophy known as Phenomenology. Now a full survey of phenomenology is somewhat beyond today's scope but in brief It's the practice in philosophy of putting the quality of experience first. We ask what is it like to experience the world. And once we've got some kind of answer to that then we move on to questions like, What is the world like? A nd we can spot some interesting things in this way. Take this cup. If I were to consider it in the way that I normally do I say that It's a cup and it has a pattern on it, it's got a chip out of it just here. I can drink tea out of it. There's tea stains in it. But if I pay attention to the way in which I experience it I noticed that I can never see all of it at once Although I think of it as being a single, Separate chunk of matter, I only ever see one side of it at a time. And I never see it just on its own I always see it against some background, or in some context. In some relation to me. So, in fact, I'm not separate from the world at all. All my thoughts and the contents of my mind are Inescapably bound up with it. For the phenomenologist, Experience is not the inscription of impressions on the blank slate of the mind but rather the Intentional relation of consciousness to a world that is neither out there in a separate realm beyond consciousness Nor in here in the form of an innate idea. For the phenomenologist, consciousness is not a thing. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. Persons do not exist as such without a world to which they belong. In a previous video we talked about Split mind theory, the idea that to be a human being is to be split into two halves, The experienced self and the ideal self. The ideal self is like an internal other that monitors and critiques our Behavior and Guenther takes this idea up and says maybe other people, And the stimulation they provide, and the examples they set to us are key to forming that ideal self. With nobody else around, there's nobody to check whether what you just saw was real or only in your head. There's nobody to tell you, implicitly or explicitly, How you should behave. And so your ability to do that for yourself? Starts to break down. The mind starts to break down. If one is deprived for long enough of the Experience of other concrete persons in a shared or common space, it is possible for one's own sense of Personhood to diminish or even collapse., While the transcendental ego, or the pure capacity for experience, remains. Without the concrete experience of other embodied egos oriented towards common objects in a shared world, My own experience of the boundaries of those perceptual objects begins to waver. It becomes difficult to tell what is real and what is only my imagination playing tricks on me. I may begin to hallucinate, Spontaneously generating an experience of imaginary others in the absence of concrete bodily relations. Or I may have less dramatic, but no less unnerving, perceptual distortions, Like the Supermax prisoners for whom the wire mesh on their door begins to vibrate Or the surface of the wall seems to bulge To the extent that we regard the prisoner is an individual who is Separable from the world and others, even if we acknowledge that This individual is a social animal whose environment has some sort of effect on physical and mental health, We fail to grasp the depths of the harm inflicted by solitary confinement. The essential relatedness to others of the human mind is exposed, perhaps, most clearly by those prisoners who throw their own feces on the walls of their cells So someone has to come in and clean it up Ordinarily we might say, "Oh, they're just being disgusting or trying to be awful towards the guards" But Guenther invites us to the idea that people who do this can do it because they literally have nothing else left to do. In a six foot by nine foot cell alone for years Sometimes decades There are no actions they can take that will meaningfully change their world. There are no tasks left to perform that can establish a relationship with somebody else. And if deprived of that relation with the world and others, the mind will break down So almost as a self defense mechanism It forces a connection with somebody, Even using the crudest of methods, even though that somebody will probably punish them more in a long term as a result. Part three: torture Little wonder then that many people will consider solitary confinement to be a form of torture. Since the 20th century, torture techniques have come on a little bit It's no longer in vogue to just put someone in thumb screws or stretch them on the rack. It's also not a particularly reliable way of obtaining information, if the goal of the torture is to get information Which it isn't always. The CIA's human resources exploitation training manual Has this to say: the torture situation is an external conflict, A contest between the subject and his tormentor. The pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself May actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain, which he feels he is inflicting upon himself, Will be more likely to sap his resistance. And in line with that, Guenther says that torture in the modern age tends to focus on turning the victim against themselves. Turning the experience itself against the ideal self. The use of stress positions like forcing a prisoner to squat for hours on end Exploits their own body as the torture device wearing them down psychologically as well as physically. It's a little bit like playing good cop bad cop, only you make the prisoner their own bad cop. That way it's a lot easier for the torturer to come in and pretend to be the good cop who genuinely cares about The prisoner and just wants to get him out of this awful situation. Survivors of places like the Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay have testified that loud music was played at them for hours by United States soldiers as an Enhanced interrogation technique and the principle there is the same. Guenther argues that solitary confinement is the purest distillation of this torture principle, turning the prisoners capacity for any kind of experience, not just pain or sound, against them. Turning the structure of their own minds against them. There are some practical implications of this discussion that are uncomfortable, but it would be disingenuous not to note them. The first is that if solitary confinement is a form of torture, Legally or morally, Then that would mean that the United States, Which imprisons more people than any other country both in terms of absolute numbers and relative to their population and regularly uses solitary confinement, Would be one of if not the Biggest torturers in the world. Certain recent events might blunt the moral shock of a sentence like that [Distorted] America But in fairness to the current regime, this practice predates them by many years. Secondly, The inhabitants of prisons in the United States and in my country the UK are Disproportionately people of color, and therefore so are the inhabitants of solitary confinement cells. In addition you might think, as I did actually before I started researching this video, that solitary confinement is only for the worst of the worst, It's only for the really dangerous people the really bad eggs. But that's also not true. Breaking prison rules can earn you time in solitary, And in prison there are a lot of rules that it's sometimes difficult to avoid breaking, especially the rules on fighting if you're caught in a bad spot and you need to defend yourself. In Pelican Bay Penitentiary in California, you can earn a trip to the special housing unit For tattooing, for having more than five dollars without permission, and even for attempted suicide. Although it seems a lot like extra punishment, There are no extra trials or legal loopholes that you have to go through before solitary is added to your sentence. It's also worth asking the really really hard question. Even if solitary was in practice only for the worst of the worst. Would it be okay to do even then? Given the nature and the type of a harm that it does, is that an OK thing to inflict on anyone? I originally had quite a different ending for this video planned, But I changed it more or less the last minute because I started to worry that it was coming across as a little bit preachy. So, umm. The the neo-nazi terrorist, Anders Brevik, Murdered 77 people including several teenagers in 2011, and, uhh, he's been in various forms of solitary confinement ever since. And I have to confess I I have no sympathy for the man. I certainly would not want to be the guy who has to sit down and talk to Anders Brevik once a week Just cuz he's gonna lose his mind if if we don't. I have sympathy and compassion for a lot of people in prison, but if you're coming at this from a place of well Why should I care about these people? Then at least in that one case Yeah, I I completely agree. But at the same time, how we feel about People in prison isn't really the philosophical issue at stake here. The question that we're bumping up against Is what is solitary confinement, and maybe prison more generally, for? Like why, why're we doing this to people? And if the answer is supposed to be Because of rehabilitation, it makes makes bad people good, then We can't really ignore the fact that solitary, and maybe to an extent prison generally, is pretty incompatible with that goal. Like you you you can't rehabilitate somebody who's just been Cancelled. Who's just been destroyed in that way. Where we we tell them To reflect on what they've done, but we just knacker them so that they can't reflect on it. We tell them to take responsibility for their actions, But we deprive them of any possible actions for which they might take responsibility. We tell them to make social and ethical Transformations, But we deprive them of anybody relative to whom they might make that kind of a transformation So We definitely don't help people in solitary confinement. We. We just make them easier to control and maybe give ourselves a little bit of schadenfreude. This is really starting to get personal now, but, um, Sometimes when I'm really going through a rough patch in my life, I have this fantasy that I get on a plane over the ocean, And it crashes, but I survive and I wash up on a beautiful desert island, and everyone in my old life They just think I'm dead, and I live there, Alone on the island for the rest of my days Because there's no one there who who can hurt me And there's no one who I can hurt, but As I get older I realized that that's not a healthy fantasy. That's a death wish. And, uh. For better and worse, we really are all intertwined there. The poet, John Donne, once wrote appropriate enough No, man is an island entire of itself Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Every man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore Never send to know For Whom the Bell Tolls. It tolls for thee. Special thanks to Dan Olsen, Mike Rugnetta Antony DeAngelo and Gabrion from cashing gaya for lending their vocal talents to this episode. You can find links to all their works below. [Music]
This is something I've been dwelling on for a while. In the West, we have a very widespread form of torture which is mostly performed on men, men of marginalised social groups and/or low incomes. It's often men with learning disabilities or mental health issues, which we then exacerbate.
I think this is a topic that has gained some traction on reddit, so I'd mostly like to let the video speak for itself and let the conversation happen automatically, but here's an excerpt that stuck out for me.
I'll also leave this piece of poetry by John Donne, which I think sums up the problem quite well:
Fundamentally, we are social creatures. We need human contact and lose our minds without it.
This is an excellent post OP, and great for this sub. It's true, the numerical majority of prisoners here (in the US) and afaik in the rest of "the west" are men, this form of torture should absolutely be considered a men's issue, beyond and in addition to incarceration in general. And you have a good point, that those targeted tend to be disadvantaged, men of color, disabled men, mentally ill men. It's disturbing to see that this can be used as a form of punishment for suicide attempts. Not that it's okay in other contexts, but there was something particularly fucked up about 1. Punishing a suicide attempt and 2. Punishing it with something guaranteed to further break a person mentally. It's sickening.
I also liked that the video brought this up- that even if we look at prison in the coldest possible way, just in terms of what happens to society when prisoners get out, the answer is still that it's fucked up. It's hard enough for prisoners re entering society with all the obstacles they run into seeking employment among other things. To send them back into society completely mentally broken is asking for things to be even worse, and I'd wager guaranteeing it. There's really no reason for it besides to torture and break people, at the expense of both the prisoners themselves and the rest of society. It's true, even the most introverted of us need social interaction, at least some of it, and we can see it in the results of doing this to people.
Obvious Throwaway account. I was in prison for 11 years from the age of 18 to the age of 29. I spent 9 months in solitary confinement. Notice I didn't say segregation or the hole. In actual solitary confinement where I never saw a human face or heard a human voice. This was due to a fight that I was in because another prisoner attempted to rape me. Unfortunately in the federal prison system, if you participated in the fight, you get punished.
After a week I was going a little loopie. After 3 weeks I was so paranoid at any noise that I would cry in fear. When my thirty days were up and they opened the door to cuff me and take me back to the dorm, I freaked and punched the officer. Bam, a new charge and a year in solitary. After the first 90 days, they made me start talking to a mental health specialist over the intercom. She was the one who, after a total of just under nine months, convinced the US Attorney to drop the charge and order my release from solitary.
She spoke to me over the intercom for three days before she felt it was safe for me to speak to the officers at the door who would be letting me out.
Prison is a traumatic event as a whole, more so for the young, but nothing that happened in my prison sentence could touch that experience. I would wake up screaming for years. It was months before I would let someone get close to me physically and talking hurt for the first week or so I was out. I flinched from everything. I was terrified of interacting with anyone. I had developed a very strong need to count everything (something I did in solitary to relieve boredom).
It took years of therapy to begin feeling like I did before. Since that time, the feds have thankfully removed the solitary confinement punishment for prisoners, opting instead for a single person cell in the hole. I would give anything had they made that decision before I was in there