American is known for innovation and ingenuity; What we've done to advance the internet, medicine, automobiles, mobile communications systems, and social media is of historical significance.
In the meantime, the fundamental methods and philosophies of punishment for crimes in our country is stuck in a medieval time warp with a few security cameras and keypads glued on top. Few prison practices today echo antiquity more than the extreme abuse and overuse of solitary confinement in the American prison system.
Academic study after study now confirms that the overuse, or use at all, of solitary confinement, particularly with children, teenagers, and even young adults, is physically and psychologically damaging to the brain and emotional development of humans. New York City just announced that it is banning the use of solitary confinement for all inmates under the age of 21 in its notorious Rikers Island prison.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
In a powerful, must-read article by Dana Liebelson, writing for Mother Jones entitled, "This Is What Happens When We Lock Children in Solitary Confinement" she details story after story of young people who became the worst ever versions of themselves after extended stays in solitary confinement.
First, she tells the story of Kenny, a 17 year old convicted for a nonviolent crime and sentenced to six months in jail. After 82 days in solitary confinement, Kenny had devolved into a version of himself foreign to his entire family.
While in isolation, Kenny—who was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder prior to the sixth grade—wrote to his mother, Melissa Bucher, begging her to make the two-hour drive to visit him. "I don't feel like I'm going to make it anymore," he wrote. "I'm in seclusion so I can't call and I'm prolly going to be in here for a while. My mind is just getting to me in here."
Bucher, a warm, lively woman who at first glance could be mistaken for Kenny's big sister, insists that forced isolation turned her teen from a social kid with some mental-health issues into a depressed young man who shies away from others and experiences panic attacks at night. "Other inmates would call me a lot and tell me he was not doing good and hearing voices," she said. When she visited Kenny, she noticed "he had scratch marks all over his arms. He was just digging into them." Alphonse Gerhardstein, an attorney representing Kenny and others in a separate lawsuit that was eventually consolidated with the Justice Department's case, noted in an email to the state attorney general's office that the boy "bangs his head frequently" and "had fresh injuries."
Soon, Kenny became someone even he didn't recognize.
"They locked me in that little room with nothing," Kenny countered when I reached him by phone a few weeks later. He was cold and lonely in the isolation room, Kenny told me, but that was nothing compared with the psychological torment. "I wasn't even thinking straight, banging my head on the door and everything else. I was acting like a crazy person," he said. "I had some of the roughest nights in there that I've ever had in my life."
Desperate for human attention, he recalled busting the cell's sprinklers and then spending nights soaked, on a wet mat. He lashed out too, and was rewarded with a separate conviction for harassing a staff member—Kenny told me he'd peed in a milk carton and threw it at a guard. "I'm not even like that, for real. I'm a good person. That place mentally messed me up," he said. "I thought I was going to end up killing somebody or something." Prior to being in solitary, he had never contemplated suicide, but in the hole, "I really wanted to die. I felt hopeless."
Dana goes on to tell the tragic story of Jonathan McClard.
Then there's the case of Jonathan McClard, who was 16 when he arranged to meet his ex's new boyfriend at a car wash in Jackson, Missouri, one summer evening in 2007. According to the Southeast Missourian, he brought his father's gun along and shot the other kid multiple times, leaving him severely wounded—surveillance footage captured Jonathan "calmly drinking a soda" afterward, the paper reported. When police arrived, he confessed, and was promptly hospitalized for suicidal ideation. He was "extremely happy," he later told the paper, when he learned that his rival's injuries were healing.
Jonathan was tried as an adult that November, sentenced to 30 years in prison, and placed in the juvenile wing of the Northeast Correctional Center in Bowling Green, where he began taking GED classes. In December, however, he landed in solitary after he "assumed an aggressive stance," according to a Department of Corrections (DOC) representative, and "leaned forward" toward correctional officers who were counseling him on hygiene.
He was still in solitary when his mother, Tracy McClard, came to visit two weeks later, just days shy of his 17th birthday. The visit was "really hard," she said. Jonathan told her he "wasn't getting any human interaction at all," was only allowed out of his cell every three days to shower, and was being fed through a slot in the door. (The DOC spokesman would only say that he had "daily interaction with staff.") To keep himself occupied, Jonathan did mental math and read the Bible. "I could see a change in him," McClard told me. "He looked so old."
After he turned 17, Jonathan was transferred from solitary to a single cell in a correctional center near Bonne Terre en route to an adult prison. The next day, when McClard came home, her daughter said that someone from the prison had called several times but wouldn't say what it was about. She called back. Jonathan was dead. He had hanged himself in his cell.
Read Dana's entire story
here and learn more about how you can advocate for policy changes on solitary confinement with Solitary Watch
here.