The Quakers helped introduce solitary confinement to the United States at the end of the 18th century, first with Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail in 1790 and, in 1829, with that city’s Eastern State Penitentiary, whose appearance was to convey “a cheerless blank indicative of the misery that awaits the unhappy being who enters within its walls,” according to the aspirations of prison officials. The goal was to chasten the mind through sensory starvation: purification by nothingness. “Left to their own devices for years on end, with no contact with family or friends and no news of the outside world, prisoners would learn to rely on their own moral and physical strength,” Guenther writes. Yet instead of turning into model citizens, many inmates appeared to suffocate. When Charles Dickens visited in 1842, he was troubled by the prison’s “daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain.”
It would be another half-century before solitary confinement returned as a favored practice in American prisons. In 1953, soldiers came back from the Korean War with stories of Chinese prisoner-of-war camps where, in Guenther’s words, “the personhood of the prisoner could be broken down and rebuilt in the form of a Communist sympathizer or revolutionary fanatic.” By the 1960s, American behaviorists had what they figured was an ideal population for their experiments: African-American prisoners whose anger must have seemed like an anti-social affront. Back in 19th-century Philadelphia, the reformer Benjamin Rush had sought to make prisoners into “republican machines.” The sensory deprivation of solitary confinement would accomplish just that, his 20th-century counterparts hoped.
They hoped wrong. “I might be the most resilient dead man in the universe,” wrote the Black Panther George Jackson in what would become the epistolary collection Soledad Brother. “The upsetting thing is that they never take into consideration the fact that I am going to resist.” Resist he did, right up to the day they shot him in the yard of San Quentin in 1971 during a bloody escape attempt.
Then, on October 22, 1983, two officers were killed at the federal prison in Marion, Ill., “the new Alcatraz” that opened when the old Alcatraz closed in 1963. As a result of the two murders, both by members of the Aryan Brotherhood, the prison would remain under lockdown until 2006, becoming the nation’s first Supermax prison—that is, a facility where the majority of inmates spend the majority of their time alone, with minimum human contact, under maximum surveillance. During the 1980s and 1990s, an estimated 44 states built a total of more than 50 such prisons, where a good portion of inmates were kept in near-total isolation. Currently, about 25,000 people are in Supermax prisons across the nation (not all Supermax inmates are in isolation, and not all isolation happens in Supermaxes, though there is a strong correlation between the two).
Amy Fettig, a lawyer for the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, explains that the building of Supermax prisons was a reaction to the prevailing political winds, rather than a result of scrupulous criminological study. “Once you build those beds, you fill them up,” Fettig told me. Many of those who wound up in solitary confinement within a Supermax had committed minor rule infractions—for example, “affiliating” with a gang by sporting certain tattoos.