It has become increasingly accepted to regard long-term solitary confinement of prisoners as torture. A new report from a psychologist who interviewed prisoners in long-term isolation adds to the bracing literature about how our prison system routinely destroys humans.

The New York Times today writes about a new report on solitary by psychologist Craig Haney, who has, over the past 20 years, interviewed men held in the supermax Pelican Bay prison in California. Haney’s full report, which he prepared in connection with a lawsuit challenging isolation practices in Pelican Bay, says that solitary places prisoners “at grave risk of psychological harm,” and is a document that lays out in painful detail just how pronounced that harm can be.

Haney notes that the American Psychological Association defines “long term” solitary as lasting four weeks or more—a time exceeded by orders of magnitude by many American prisoners who have suffered in solitary for years. Studies of prison isolation have found that it produces symptoms including “anxiety, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, loss of control, irritability, aggression, rage, paranoia, hopelessness, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, self mutilation, and suicidal ideation and behavior.”

The Pelican Bay prisoners Haney spoke to spend nearly 23 hours a day in 80 square-foot cells, with little human contact and no view of the outside world. Nearly 30% of those he interviewed last year—some of whom have spent two decades living under the same conditions—reported having suicidal thoughts.

Here are just a few examples of what these men said about their lives, from Haney’s report:

For example, one prisoner (Prisoner A) who had been housed continuously in the PBSHU since 1989 (except for a brief one month period) told me that he had only one visit (in 2004) during that entire 24 year period. He said that although he had not received any CDCR Rules Violation Reports (commonly referred to as “115s”) since 1997, he nonetheless remained housed on the “short corridor” with other prisoners whom the CDCR has judged to be gang members. As he put it, “Anything we do as validated gang members is interpreted as continuing evidence of gang activity.” When I asked him one of the specific symptom questions having to do with “irrational anger” (i.e., getting any over insignificant things or for no reason) he answered emphatically “no,” and then explained, “I am angry a lot but I know why.” He described being depressed all the time, telling me “this is it—it gets to you. [There are] very few signs of hope or things to look forward to.” He also told me that he has become withdrawn,discourages people from coming to see him, rarely initiates conversation or contact and “I just don’t feel comfortable around people.” He also told me that “every day I struggle with mental survival.”

Another:

Another prisoner (Prisoner B), who had been housed in the PBSHU continuously since June, 1990, told me that he has not had any violent 115s since being housed at the facility and that all of his write-ups have been for relatively minor things like talking in the law library or participating in the recent hunger strike. He said his last social visit from anyone from the outside world occurred about 15 years ago, when his wife came to see him sometime around 1998. He told me that he struggles against “isolation psychosis” and that “I fight against what is happening to me.” He analogized the gradual but nonetheless damaging changes that have taken place in him this way: “If they put me in Chernobyl and gave me food and a TV and left me alone it wouldn’t mean that the radioactive environment wasn’t making me sick.”

Another:

Another prisoner (Prisoner D) who had been in the PBSHU continuously since 1990, and had been in isolated confinement for several years before that, spoke at length about the asociality that had come about as a result of so many years of social deprivation. He described himself as once having been “a people person,” but now finds that there are “many times I don’t want any part of people. ‘Keep quiet and leave me alone’—that’s my motto. Don’t bother me and I will do the same.” He elaborated: “Just leave me alone. I have no wife, no children… leave me to do my time. That’s all we can do in here.” He was acutely aware of how profoundly he had been changed by the long-term social isolation to which he had been subjected. He told me: “I have not been around people for28 years. I only knew my family for 18 [before he came to prison]. I don’t feel close to them or [to my] homeboys, as messed up as that sounds. Even if they died…” and then his voice trailed off.

And another:

(Prisoner K) told me he had come into the prison system while still in his teens, and had spent most of his 19 years in prison in isolated confinement, including the last approximately 16 years housed continuously in the PBSHU. He said, “I grew up in here. It’s all I know. I have nothing to compare it to. It’s like time broke… I watch people lose it. I say, ‘Idon’t want to be like that.’ [It’s] a constant struggle to stay sane… The hardestthing about this place is maintaining control of yourself against the pressure…You are trying to control chaos in a controlled space.”

But he had spent so much time spent in isolation that the experience had taken a toll, one that he clearly recognized: “I’m barely able to associate. I don’t relate to my family. I don’t understand the world. I don’tremember what my house looked like, what my sister looks like. I am completelyuncomfortable in the social world.”

If you have any doubt that our prison system is slowly torturing and mentally destroying prisoners using isolation practices, please read Haney’s entire report.

[Photo: AP]