ACLU Blog Post: Ten Years Without Other People

On August 13, 2014 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) posted an blog post by Nzinga A. Harrison, MD that we thought was reposting.  An excerpt follows and you can read by the entire piece by clicking here.

Every time they throw my brother into solitary, he loses contact visits. When we visit, he’s behind glass, or we can only see him via video. We can’t hug him. He can’t hold his new baby niece.

My brother, Kofi M. Ajabu, has been imprisoned by the Indiana Department of Correction for nearly 20 years. All told, we estimate that he’s spent nearly 10 of those years in a solitary cell, alone for 23 hours a day.

I am a psychiatrist. I know that I could prescribe a million medicines and give countless hours of psychotherapy, but none of it will be as effective if I do not help my patients connect to other human beings.

The effects of solitary confinement are well documented. High rates of suicide, anxiety, obsessive ruminations, violent thoughts, trouble sleeping, paranoia, and hallucinations are direct results of confinement. Because of these effects, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Méndez, has called for an absolute ban on the use of solitary confinement lasting longer than 15 days.

Every day, I treat individuals with the same symptoms, albeit with biological and psychosocial causes other than solitary confinement. The unifying theme in each of my recommendations is reconnecting my patients to a social support system.

Our “correctional” system, whose original goal was rehabilitation, takes the opposite approach. At a time when many are at a point of greatest need, the system removes the one factor that is universally accepted as a basic psychological and physiological need: contact with other human beings. Without it, prisoners’ minds deteriorate.

Read the entire piece by clicking here.