Albert Woodfox in February this year (Image: WBRZ-TV via AP)
A US court order to , held in solitary confinement in Louisiana for 43 years, might be a victory for justice. But it is also a sharp reminder of the prevalence of this cruel practice throughout the US, in which inmates are shut away without human contact for 23 hours a day.
Legal wrangles continue over the fate of Woodfox, accused with two other inmates of the killing of a prison guard in 1972 – a conviction twice overturned. Collectively known as the Angola Three after the jail’s name, their case became a focus for humanitarian campaigners.
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His may be the longest stretch in isolation, but the fact is more than 80,000 prisoners are in solitary on any given day in the US, according to the . Of those, 25,000 are in super-maximum security prisons designed for this very purpose.
Significant trauma
Several decades of research into the psychology of supermax prisoners has found that the majority suffer significant trauma as a result of being isolated. suffer serious mental illness or brain damage.
This shouldn’t surprise us, since psychologists have shown that just a few weeks in “the hole” can trigger panic attacks, anxiety, loss of control, irrational anger, paranoia, hallucinations, excessive rumination, depression, insomnia, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, obsessive thoughts, cognitive dysfunction, self-mutilation and a host of social pathologies that would make it hard to function in normal society.
Little wonder that a disproportionately high number of supermax prisoners kill themselves: in 2005, . The longer the confinement, the more damaged the inmate and the longer they take to recover – if at all.
Geneva Conventions
The US’s view that solitary confinement is an acceptable punishment runs counter to almost all international agreements on human rights. Where it causes “severe mental pain or suffering” – which it does in almost all circumstances – it violates the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has on its use in civilian prisons, describing it as “a harsh measure which is contrary to rehabilitation, the aim of the penitentiary system”.
And the International Committee of the Red Cross, which prefers to decide on a case-by-case basis whether solitary confinement constitutes abuse, has nonetheless declared that it “is in principle undesirable and should be avoided”.
Basic sense of being
Woodfox’s lawyer has said he is suffering “a horrible toll” from his four decades in solitary. It would be odd if he weren’t. Psychologists claim that the pathological effects of isolation stem from the lack of social interaction, without which inmates find it hard to maintain a sense of their own identity, the appropriateness of their emotions and how they relate to a wider social world.
In other words, it threatens not just their health, but their basic sense of being. As the philosopher puts it in her 2013 study Solitary Confinement: Social death and its afterlives: “There are many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. They see things that do not exist, and they fail to see things that do.”
It is time the US recognised the practice for what it is: barbaric.
