Cell at Pelican Bay state supermax in California.
“Isolation gnaws at the brain. Imagine yourself in your own windowless bathroom, day after day, with no human touch or able to see the sun, much less feel it. I am keenly aware of every single minute. Time weighs heavy.”
“If I try to imagine what kind of death, even a slow one, would be worse than twenty-five years in the box—and I have tried to imagine it—I can come up with nothing.”
Cell at ADX Florence, the federal supermax prison in Colorado.
“By the third week, I found myself squatting in a corner of the yard, filing fingernails down over coarse concrete walls. My sense of human decency dissipating with each day.”
“I’ve hung up with a self-made noose and sliced my wrist, because this place has driven me to the brink of insanity.”
“One man took the plastic face off his radio, sharpened the plastic on the floor of the cell, and cut the jugular vein out of his neck.”
“After years of this torture, will I survive on the outside? Will I be able to be held by my loved ones, after all these years of no human contact? Will I even be myself again? The person I was before solitary confinement shattered my spirit?”
Solitary confinement cell in Illinois.