Isolation in Modern Prisons

John Hopkins Magazine: Thousands of American prisoners spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement


After reading excerpts of Regina Kunzel's "Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality," parallels can be drawn from Kunzel's findings to the disturbing discoveries of an article published in the John Hopkins Magazine in the spring of 2015. Through the eyes of Gabriel Eber, Staff Council at the ACLU National Prison Project, shocking accounts are relived, many detailing the conditions inside and outside East Mississippi Correctional Facility's isolation cells. Stories of medically unsound prisoners being left for hours upon hours without medical attention are commonplace at EMCF. A 43-year-old black male died inside an isolation cell due to a severe heart condition and lack of any medical intervention, but not before first harming himself and setting fire to his room. Within the article, a correlation is made between isolation and self harm, according to a 2014 study by the American Journal of Public Health, which noted that of the prisoners placed in isolation throughout the three year period, 53 percent harmed themselves, and 45 percent committed acts that were deemed as potentially life-threatening.

Upon reading about these horrific stories, I began to think about Kunzel's mentioning of New York's Auburn Penitentiary and its own system of isolation. While prisoners were forced to move about their daily activities in complete silence, they still were granted company of their fellow inmates through side-by-side labor during the day. This strikingly contrasts with EMCF's isolation cells, where prisoners are left with only the company of four plain walls and their own thoughts. Place within the isolation cell a multitude of health problems and an absence of attention from the two correction officers waiting outside the door, and you have a potential fatality on your hands. Despite modern prisons being socially interactive whereas nineteenth century prisons were more focused on the solitude of the inmates, we still witness a shocking amount of attempts within modern prisons to enforce isolation, which only leads to galvanize mental anguish and disorders as well as the infliction of self-harm.

The idea that the practice of isolation within modern prison systems today is a way of keeping prisoners separate from one another is an argument up for debate. In the article I read, Eber asks the question of why isolation has become the mental institution of last resort. Seeing that most modern institutions view social interaction in a positive light, we are left to ask why prison systems today are still isolating those who need positive social reinforcement the most?