Solitary Confinement vs. Capital Punishment: A Comparative Analysis

Introduction

Solitary confinement represents one of the most effective means of preventing modern-day prisoners from communicating and engaging in conflict, yet it carries the most injurious effects on their health. Individuals imprisoned under conditions of solitary confinement demonstrate higher rates of psychotic behavior compared to the general prison population, including significantly elevated rates of suicide. After a prisoner loses the mental capacity to understand the reason for his or her imprisonment or punishment, subjecting that person to solitary confinement becomes pointless. If one loses the ability to understand punishment, the consequences associated with one's actions become irrelevant and carry no rehabilitative value. Thus, solitary confinement is crueler than capital punishment.

The debate over whether solitary confinement constitutes greater torture than capital punishment — also known as the death penalty — has recently gained considerable public attention. The discussion has reached a point where, for some, capital punishment emerges as the more humane option by comparison.

Solitary Confinement and Capital Punishment: Background

During the early part of the 19th century, the concept of prisons was relatively new. Until that time, punishment for criminal offenses was administered by communities. Some communities adopted the Hammurabian method of eye-for-an-eye retaliation, with public executions in packed town squares serving as the penalty for crimes ranging from burglary to rape and murder. As judicial systems grew more sophisticated, community leaders sought more civilized methods of punishment and began exploring the concept of "rehabilitation" (Biggs, 2009). The U.S. Supreme Court, in the latter part of the 19th century, began examining a growing body of European clinical evidence demonstrating that solitary confinement was linked to dire psychological consequences. In Germany, where the isolationist Pennsylvania penal model had been implemented, doctors noted a sharp rise in cases of psychosis among prison inmates. In 1890, the Court condemned the use of long-lasting solitary confinement as punishment, observing that a significant number of inmates reached a state of semi-fatuousness, while others exhibited violent insanity. Prisons constructed after this era — including Angola — increasingly took the shape of secure dormitories built for captive manual laborers, as intended by the Auburn prison system. Prisoners were made to work in prison industries, an arrangement that kept them occupied while also helping sustain the institutions. For instance, the "Sing Sing" prison was constructed atop a mine, built entirely from the underlying rock using inmate labor.

The Eastern State Penitentiary, where the infamous "Philadelphia system" was born, failed miserably and closed in 1971 — a century after the "total isolation" concept had already been largely abandoned. Nevertheless, what the system revealed about solitary confinement's torturous effects proved attractive to those more concerned with retribution than rehabilitation. Throughout the last century, solitary confinement took the form of a purely punitive tool used for breaking the spirit of violent, disobedient, or disruptive inmates. However, it was seldom employed as a long-term punishment even by the most severe wardens — after all, while a broken spirit may eliminate danger, a broken mind creates it (Biggs, 2009). In the last twenty-five years, however, the modern penal system appears to have reverted to the practices — minus the theories — that governed the Eastern State Philadelphia System. Contemporary society no longer trusts the "penitent" element of "penitentiary," and "corrections" systems have demonstrably failed to correct disruptive behavior; rather, they appear to be breeding it. Today, nearly every maximum-security American prisoner is maintained in some form of solitary setting for significant portions of their prison terms. The introduction of "control unit" and "supermax" prisons in the early 1970s has resulted in pod-based "security housing units" in which each inmate is isolated in a separate cell for nearly the entire day.

Activists and lawyers have, for many decades, called into question the constitutionality of the severest punishments meted out by the American criminal justice system. Is it acceptable to administer lethal injections? Are firing squads constitutional? Is life imprisonment an appropriate punishment for drug possession, piracy, or passing bad checks? Yet one rarely hears questions raised against solitary confinement — arguably the most severe and inhumane of all punishments (Kozinski, 2016). Approximately 100,000 individuals are currently subject to 23 hours per day of solitude in cells the size of a parking space. In a society where posting a rap video online can result in a solitary confinement sentence of no fewer than three years, we must ask harder questions about how individuals enter this form of confinement, what their existence becomes under isolation, and how they might eventually be released.

During the early 19th century, America experimented with solitary confinement — placing prisoners in isolated cells with no stimulation and no access to other human beings — as a rehabilitation measure. The results were disastrous, as inmates suffered serious psychological damage ("Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons"). Seeing its devastating consequences, society largely abandoned the practice. More than a century later, however, it has unfortunately made a comeback. Rather than confining prisoners in dark underground dungeons, modern institutions place them in sterile, well-lit concrete boxes — yet similar psychological effects have been observed. Currently, several thousand individuals across the United States are detained in small, windowless concrete cells in near-total solitude for 22 to 24 hours each day. These cells are equipped with a shower and a toilet. A slit in each cell door is used by guards to deliver food trays. Prisoners in solitary confinement typically have no right to contact visits or telephone calls. Their allotted "recreation" consists of being shackled or handcuffed and escorted for 60 minutes to a different solitary cell, where they are permitted to pace alone before being returned to their original cell.

The earliest codified laws pertaining to the death penalty date to the 18th century B.C. The Code of Hammurabi prescribed death for twenty-five different crimes. Capital punishment also appears in the Hittite Code (14th century B.C.), Athens' Draconian Code (7th century B.C.) — under which every offense was punishable by death — and the Twelve Tables of Rome (5th century B.C.). Execution methods included crucifixion, burning alive, impalement, beating, and drowning ("Introduction to the Death Penalty"). The United States' death penalty tradition is largely rooted in British practice; European settlers brought their capital punishment framework with them to America. The first documented execution in America — that of Spanish spy Captain George Kendall — occurred in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608. Virginia's governor Sir Thomas Dale enacted moral, martial, and divine laws in 1612; under this code, death was prescribed even for minor offenses such as trading with Native Americans, stealing grapes, or killing chickens. Each colony maintained its own laws concerning capital punishment. The Massachusetts Bay Colony carried out its first execution in 1630, even before New England's capital laws were formally enacted. New York Colony's Duke's Laws, implemented in 1665, imposed death on individuals who denied the existence of God or struck a parent ("Introduction to the Death Penalty").

Hazards of Solitary Confinement

It is widely agreed that solitary confinement constitutes a torturous punishment. This view is shared by U.S. Senator John McCain, himself a former prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, who has stated that isolation is capable of weakening one's resistance and crushing one's spirit in ways that no other form of mistreatment can. McCain's experience corroborates researchers' consensus that solitary confinement has profoundly adverse psychological impacts on prisoners ("The Dangerous Overuse of Solitary Confinement in the United States"). A Red Cross psychiatrist, writing in 2007, compared physical torture with solitary confinement and concluded that prolonged isolation in a prison cell is considered the hardest torment to endure even by hardened convicts accustomed to abuse and harsh conditions. As one prison psychiatrist put it, it is a well-established psychiatric fact that any person placed in extended isolation will eventually lose their sanity.

Beyond the manifestation of psychiatric symptoms, those sentenced to solitary confinement are consistently associated with higher rates of suicide and self-harm. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in February 2014 found that inmates in solitary confinement were nearly seven times more likely to engage in self-harm than those in the general prison population. This effect was especially pronounced among young inmates and those with serious mental illness. In 2004, 73% of prison suicides occurred in isolation units — units that housed fewer than 10% of the total prison population ("The Dangerous Overuse of Solitary Confinement in the United States"). Suicide rates in isolation units were nearly three times those in non-segregated prison settings. In recognition of these dangers, organizations including Mental Health America, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Society of Correctional Physicians, and the American Public Health Association have all issued formal policy statements opposing extended solitary confinement, particularly for inmates with mental illness.

Researchers have documented that extended solitary confinement produces chronic and heightened anxiety, insomnia, headaches, chronic fatigue, heart palpitations, nightmares, elevated hypertension, and fear of impending nervous breakdown ("Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons"). Additional documented effects include obsessive rumination, irrational anger, violent fantasies, mood swings, general deterioration of functioning, suicidal ideation, hallucinations, disordered thinking, chronic depression, social withdrawal, hypersensitivity to stimuli, and emotional flatness. Exposure to these conditions constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment in clear violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the international community has broadly condemned the practice as torture.

A major hunger strike involving approximately 30,000 prisoners was organized primarily in protest of solitary confinement, under which inmates had endured years or even decades of near-total deprivation of social contact and sensory stimulation. Psychologists and advocates argue that the human brain cannot adapt to these conditions, and classify prolonged isolation as torture. Isolated individuals tend to experience anger, anxiety, erratic mood swings, and hallucinations, and often lose control over their impulses (Keim, 2013). These effects are particularly severe among individuals with pre-existing vulnerability to mental illness and may produce permanent changes in brain functioning. Psychiatrist Terry Kupers, a prominent critic of solitary confinement, has stated that a cluster of symptoms appears almost universally in isolated prisoners — symptoms so consistent that they constitute a recognizable syndrome — and that the resulting damage is permanent.

Accounts from prisoners evoke both dystopian fiction and medieval cruelty. In euphemistically labeled "special housing" or "administrative segregation" units, inmates spend all but one hour per day confined in cells the size of a bathroom, under permanently-lit fluorescent lighting and continuous video surveillance. Their only social contact consists of brief glimpses of other inmates, occasional video conferences with family members, and routine encounters with guards. A limited number of books may be available, but access to radios or televisions is typically prohibited. A second hunger strike in 2011 succeeded in securing basic amenities such as wall calendars and wool hats for the cold season (Keim, 2013). Enforced isolation may last for years or even decades. First-hand accounts illuminate the human cost: one young prisoner reported that the only path left to him was to "go crazy," as documented in a study of juveniles in solitary confinement. Some may dismiss such accounts as anecdotal, but the scientific evidence is equally compelling.

Heather Rice, prison policy expert at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, has noted that corrections officials often claim prisoners feign mental illness — making the hard scientific evidence all the more significant. Research on the harmful effects of solitary confinement emerged in waves beginning in the mid-1800s, when the practice fell out of widespread favor among Americans and Europeans. A second wave appeared in the 1950s, prompted by accounts of isolation and brainwashing during the Korean War (Keim, 2013). The most recent body of research was driven by solitary confinement's resurgence in the United States during the 1980s, following cuts to rehabilitation programs and worsening prison overcrowding. Across all these research periods, consistent patterns emerge: extreme anxiety, mood instability, emotional flatness, anger, hallucinations, and loss of impulse control. With no external stimuli, inmates may become hypersensitive to even minor sensory input. They commonly develop an uncontrollable preoccupation with minor personal grievances, as though their own minds have turned against them. Panic attacks, memory loss, cognitive decline, and depression are routine findings.

Conclusion

Some individuals sentenced to solitary confinement have chosen a swift and certain death over continued daily torture. Data indicate that approximately 50% of all prison suicides occur among inmates held in isolation. A New York study reported that isolated prisoners were five times more likely to die by suicide than those in the general prison population (Ridgeway, 2014). This disparity persists despite the fact that committing suicide in a bare solitary confinement cell is extraordinarily difficult: some inmates have hurled themselves headfirst from their bunks, while others have bitten through the veins in their arms. Even among death row inmates, there are those who choose to hasten their end rather than face the prospect of spending the remainder of their lives in a torturous isolated setting. In California's San Quentin, which houses more than 700 death row inmates, only 13 executions have been carried out since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. By contrast, 22 inmates have died by suicide, including 8 cases that occurred after California imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2006. These figures underscore the paper's central argument: for many prisoners, solitary confinement is a punishment worse than death.

References

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"Introduction to the Death Penalty." Death Penalty Information Center. Web.

Keim, Brandon. "The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement." Wired. 10 July 2013. Web.

Kozinski, Alex. "Worse than Death." The Yale Law Journal. 15 Jan. 2016. Web.

Ridgeway, James. "What Death Penalty Opponents Don't Get." HuffPost Politics. 12 Dec. 2014. Web.

"The Dangerous Overuse of Solitary Confinement in the United States." ACLU. 2014. Web.

"Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons." Center for Constitutional Rights. 31 May 2012. Web.