Solitary Confinement: Torture we still use?

During this interesting time of lockdown, I thought I’d have a look into the beginnings and effects of solitary confinement. Although it is a morbid issue it seems important now because some people during these tough times are going to be suffering through a similar feeling.
Solitary confinement has always been a form of punishment and became a prison staple in the US in the 1700s with the introduction of the “Penitentiary House” block of the Walnut Street Prison. It was based on a Quaker idea of penitence, hence the term penitentiary, and surrounded the idea that reflection was the road to reform, not corporal punishment. In the Walnut Street Prison, this block was unique as most of the prison consisted of common rooms that were filthy and bred disease and violence because of overcrowding and lack of attention. This one-block, however, was used for holding the more extreme crimes and as the idea seemed to work many prisons later adopted it. However, in a small block in the centre of an overcrowded prison were you ever truly solitary.
When it was adopted by other prisons, the idea was refined. One such prison was the Eastern State Penitentiary which Charles Dickens wrote about in his American Notes for general consumption.  He visited several prisons and saw the entry and exit of its inmates, all of which he was shocked. Upon entering the solitary prison the inmates would be transported around with hoods on so that they were constantly disorientated and unaware of their surroundings, they were taken to a cell about 12ft by 7ft which had a water pipe, a drain, and a mattress and this would be their home for anything up to 10 years.


Dickens wrote about an inmate who had been in solitary confinement for 2 years and he was a changed person, whether he was reformed was another matter. He wrote of how he trembled constantly and couldn’t settle, the guards explained to him that the shakes were normal, and that solitary confinement could lead to the complete derangement of the nervous system. The guard told him that due to the disorientation from the hoods and the surroundings the inmates would leave as if they were drunk and although for the most part, they would recover eventually this shows the impact that disorientation can have on a man.
Dickens wrote that the experience of Eastern State Penitentiary was one of being buried alive to be dug out in the slow round of years and that the hoods were the veil between the inmate and the rest of society. He concluded that being stuck in a room alone with only one's own horrific anxieties was worse than any torture of the body and that the impact incurs few cries that the human could hear.
Solitary confinement, as a punishment, was very nearly announced as unconstitutional because of the extreme reactions the inmates were having to it. Atul Gawande's’ article shows that in 1890 the US supreme court was called in to investigate because even after a short time the inmates were leaving in a “semi-fatuous condition” from which they were next to impossible to arouse, others become violently insane, commit suicide and those who did survive were mentally broken and unable to function.  In fact, Rubin argues that by the 1820s penal reformers and prison administrators both argued that solitary confinement was a negative punishment.
Despite this, solitary confinement still exists, even though it is now for days as opposed to years and you can communicate not only with the guards but the other inmates already held in the cells. The separation from familiar settings and proper human interaction is still considered a severe punishment because, for most, we are our own worst enemy.