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<h1><small>New Report Examines the Hardships of Life After
Solitary Confinement</small></h1>
<div id="single-date" class="date">August 10, 2012</div>
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<div class="tags"><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/10/new-report-examines-the-hardships-of-life-after-solitary-confinement/">http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/10/new-report-examines-the-hardships-of-life-after-solitary-confinement/</a></small></small><a
href="http://solitarywatch.com/tag/supermax-prisons/" rel="tag"></a></div>
<div class="author"> <span class="by-author"><span class="sep">by</span>
<span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n"
href="http://solitarywatch.com/author/jeancasellaandjamesridgeway/"
title="View all posts by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway" rel="author">Jean
Casella and James Ridgeway</a></span> </span> </div>
</div>
<p>An important new report, released yesterday by the American Friends
Service Committee in Arizona, is the first to focus on the effects
solitary confinement has on its survivors <em>after</em>they leave
prison. <a href="http://afsc.org/document/lifetime-lockdown-report"><em>Lifetime
in Lockdown: How Isolation Conditions Impact Prisoner Reentry</em></a>, finds
that spending time in solitary leaves people “deeply traumatized and
essentially socially disabled.” These “crippling symptoms” combine with
“the extensive legal and structural barriers to successful reentry” to
create “recipe for failure.” It is hardly surprising, then, that the
report is able to “directly link conditions in Arizona’s supermax
prisons with the state’s high recidivism rate.”</p>
<p><em>Lifetimes in Lockdown</em> raises issues that have been largely
absent from research and discussions on prisoner reentry and
recidivism. As the report points out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Much of the discourse…has focused on what are referred to as
‘collateral consequences’: the structural barriers erected by
institutions that bar people with criminal convictions from voting,
housing, employment, welfare assistance, and other factors critical to
ensuring success upon release. Rarely is there discussion of the direct
impact that prison conditions have on a person’s cognitive, emotional,
social, and behavioral functioning and therefore, on that person’s
ability to function as a member of society post-incarceration.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The most serious problems, of course, result from the ”deleterious
mental health impacts of incarceration in super maximum-security—or
“supermax”—environments,” which remain with people long after they
leave solitary for the general population, or leave prison for the free
world. In addition, the report finds, “policies limiting visitation and
prohibiting maximum-security prisoners from participation in education,
treatment, and employment have a negative impact on these prisoners’
reentry prospects.”</p>
<p>Yet the Arizona Department of Corrections, like most prison systems,
does little to “prepare prisoners who have been held in supermax during
their incarceration for reentry to the community,” and on the outside,
“social service agencies are largely unaware of, and unprepared to
address, the special needs of this population.” Many survivors of
solitary “‘slip through the cracks,’ while others self-isolate and
deliberately avoid social service agencies.”</p>
<p><span id="more-6486"></span></p>
<p>The report is based largely on research done by Dr. Brackette F.
Williams, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Arizona, under a Soros Justice Fellowship. Under the name “Project
Homecoming,” Brackette worked with the AFSC in Arizona to study the
impact of solitary confinement on prisoner reetry. As the report notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Psychologist Dr. Terry Kupers makes the comparison between
prisoners who have just been released from solitary confinement in a
supermax facility and persons who were recently on suicide watch. The
most likely and dangerous time for violence, acting out, or another
crisis to occur is immediately after one is released. Dr. Kupers says,
“Whether a prisoner leaves the isolation unit and gets into trouble on
the yard or ‘maxes out…’ and gets into trouble in the community, we are
seeing a new population of prisoners who, on account of lengthy stints
in isolation units, are not well prepared to return to a social
milieu.” This is an institutional and systemic problem that is created
by the conditions of incarceration…</p>
<p>The participants reported that they would often avoid the areas
where the few available social service agencies, transitional homes,
and homeless shelters are located, because these are areas where they
made poor choices previously. Likewise, available shelters offer very
little in the way of privacy, are always crowded, and difficult to get
into. For prisoners who have spent years in isolation, such an
environment would be the last place they would want to turn. While
deciding to avoid problem locations would usually be considered wise,
the reality is complex–in these cases, it renders the individuals even
more isolated and lacking any support networks or services. Here, the
self-inflicted social isolation that was created by the extreme
isolation in prison is most noticeably debilitating.</p>
<p>In describing his life on the outside, one participant who avoided
old neighborhoods and contacts said that “life is way harder out here
for me than it is in there.” He is not alone in this nostalgia for
prison life and for the isolation of the supermax cell. A female
participant, also homeless and barely getting by at the time of the
interview, said almost ashamedly, “The worst thing that I can honestly
say about trying to get back into society is I miss my cage more and
more everyday. I just can’t function out here.” When asked, “Do you
want to the small cage back or the big cage?” she replied, “The smaller
the better. I can control everything in it.” They make repeated efforts
to avoid people, for example moving to the edge of the city or living
alone in a tunnel. It is strikingly reminiscent of the social
withdrawal that Craig Haney describes as endemic to persons held in
isolation for long periods, except now they are outside the supermax
cell, in the great wide open of supposed freedom, which terrifies them.</p>
<p>Thoughts of suicide permeated many of the participants’
interviews, especially when the conversation turned toward plans for
the future. At least 10 of the male participants (50 percent) from Pima
County had considered suicide between their release from prison and
their first interview. Each participant who reported suicidal thoughts
mentioned them in more than one of their interviews. Strikingly, some
of these men had been out of prison less than one week when the first
interview took place. They reported the inability to see a viable way
to remain out of prison, yet at the same time could not imagine doing
more prison time. By their final interview, three of these men stated
that they considered suicide on a daily basis, but had yet to act on
these considerations. A few also considered committing some crime that
would land them back in prison and allow for more time to devise a
better strategy for handling life on the outside.</p>
<p>Anyone leaving prison is faced with an unwelcoming social
landscape. The simultaneous necessity and absence of housing and work
are experienced immediately. The freedom of release is truncated by
limited housing options, partially as a result of neighborhood bans on
people with felony convictions, and a job market that has very little
inclination or incentive to hire former prisoners. Add to this reality
significantly higher rates of mental illness; tendencies toward social
withdrawal; lack of support networks or family to rely on due to the
added social distance of a supermax prison; and no transition services
after spending years in the most extreme isolation, and the experience
of a former supermax prisoner begins to take shape. More notably it
begins to demonstrate the compounded effects of supermax confinement
and the additional limitations once released. In the same way, one
prisoner’s perceived ease of life in prison compared to his experiences
of life on the outside, as well as another’s longing for a space she
can control even if it is a cage, demonstrates precisely the extra
layer of difficulties created by prolonged isolation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A press release from AFSC calls the report’s findings ”a wake-up
call to corrections officials, state leaders, and social service
agencies, who are often completely unaware of the prison experiences of
their clients or how to assist them in this transition. AFSC hopes that
this research will add to the growing body of evidence that the
practice of long-term solitary confinement in supermax units creates
more problems than it is purported to solve and should be abolished.”</p>
<p>AFSC also notes that “the release of this report coincides with the
launch of <a
href="http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1890/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=11317">Arizona
is Maxed Out</a>, a joint campaign with the ACLU of Arizona against the
planned expansion of maximum-security prisons in Arizona. The latest
state budget allocated $50 million to build 500 more maximum-security
beds in the next two years.”</p>
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