Still, some see solitary confinement as a necessity. Donn Rowe, who heads the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, said in an emailed statement that “it is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools [of solitary confinement] away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on a daily basis.” It’s hard for those of us who have never served as corrections officers to refute that argument.
Regardless, many consider solitary confinement to be in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s injunction against cruel and unusual punishment. Jerry Elster, a former Crips member from California who spent more than two decades in prison for murder, knows better. “Of course it’s torture,” he told me, having spent much of his first five years behind bars in solitary confinement for a variety of infractions. “It is as close as you can get to physically just attacking someone without actually putting your hands on ’em.” Elster, who now works for the Bay Area organization Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, says solitary confinement is “like being in a dirty bathroom.”
Guenther quotes as readily from those who’ve languished in the box as she does from philosophers. The insights of the former are so meticulously horrific that you’re suddenly overcome with the realization that what we promised to correct we have further corrupted instead. They know this, too, and will not let us forget it. Visitors to segregated housing units commonly report prisoners throwing excrement at the walls, sometimes smearing themselves with it. This may be a sign of mental illness, but it could also be a rational response to an irrational situation: by making their waste flagrantly visible, the prisoners announce that they are still alive, that they cannot be ignored. They are shoving their humanity in the guards’ faces.
One of the more curious arguments Guenther proffers is that arguing for human rights for inmates in solitary is not as effective as arguing for their animal ones. “Animals in factory farms or laboratories face many of the same challenges as prison inmates,” Guenther writes, “and suffer many similar effects on their physical, mental, and emotional health.” It does seem a little strange that while cage-free eggs and free-range beef are celebrated, caged, no-range people are ignored.