Daniel sent us this one. He's asking about solitary confinement — what actually happens to people in there, psychologically and physically, and why it's become such a flashpoint in debates about prison systems. The core tension here is that we've got a punishment that doesn't leave visible scars but seems to unravel people in ways that sound almost... And yet we keep using it. So where do we even start?
Let's start with the numbers, because they're staggering. There was a report from Solitary Confinement dot org that estimates something like eighty thousand people are in solitary confinement in the United States on any given day. That's the population of a small city, sitting in concrete boxes, twenty-three hours a day. Some of them for days, some for years. The longest documented case I've seen is a man who spent more than forty years in solitary.
Forty years of looking at the same wall. At that point the wall probably starts looking back.
It almost does, and that's not even a joke. The psychological effects are so profound that researchers have given them a name — SHU syndrome. S-H-U, for Special Housing Unit, which is the bureaucratic euphemism for solitary. Symptoms include severe anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, and something called "social withdrawal to the point of functional incapacity." People forget how to be around other people.
Forgetting how to be around people — that's not just a symptom, that's the whole mechanism of what this punishment does. It's not a side effect. It's the point, in a way.
That's the thing that critics keep hammering on. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said that prolonged solitary confinement — they define it as more than fifteen days — constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The Nelson Mandela Rules, which the UN adopted in twenty fifteen, call for its prohibition as a disciplinary measure. This isn't fringe stuff. This is the global human rights consensus.
That's their red line. Meanwhile we've got people doing fifteen years.
The effects start way before fifteen days. There was a fascinating BBC Future piece from early twenty twenty-five that looked at what happens in the first seventy-two hours. Sleep disruption sets in almost immediately because you lose all the environmental cues that regulate your circadian rhythm — no natural light, no activity cycles, no meal timing that makes sense. By day three, people start reporting a kind of cognitive fog. Thoughts get circular. They start talking to themselves, not as a quirk, but as a survival mechanism to fill the silence.
The brain generating its own stimulus because there's nothing coming in.
And that's where hallucinations begin. The brain is so starved for input that it starts manufacturing it. People hear voices, they see shapes in the walls, they feel sensations that aren't there. It's not psychosis in the traditional sense — it's the brain's sensory processing system essentially eating itself.
"Eating itself" — that's the phrase that should be on every policy brief about this.
Let me give you a concrete case because I think the abstract descriptions don't land the way a single story does. There was a man named Kalief Browder in New York. Arrested at sixteen for allegedly stealing a backpack — he maintained his innocence — and held at Rikers Island for three years without trial. Two of those years were in solitary confinement. He was released in twenty thirteen, charges dropped. And in twenty fifteen, he took his own life. His family said he was never the same after solitary. The paranoia, the depression, the inability to sleep — none of it stopped when he got out.
The punishment outlasted the punishment.
That's the phrase. And this is what critics mean when they say solitary confinement doesn't just punish — it damages. The damage persists long after the door is unlocked. Researchers have documented what they call "post-isolation syndrome," which looks a lot like PTSD but has its own distinct features. People are hypervigilant in ways that make normal social interaction almost impossible. They flinch at eye contact. They can't tolerate noise. They have panic attacks in crowds.
You've got a system that takes people who are already — in many cases — struggling with impulse control, with social regulation, with whatever got them incarcerated, and then it strips away every remaining social muscle they had. And then releases them. What's the recidivism picture?
Human Rights Watch has documented this repeatedly. People who go through prolonged solitary confinement are more likely to reoffend upon release, not less. It's one of those outcomes that makes you stop and ask — what exactly are we optimizing for here?
Retribution dressed up as management.
I think that's a fair read. But let me play out the other side for a second, because the defenders of solitary aren't just cartoon villains. Prison administrators will tell you — and I think they're sincere about this — that they need some mechanism for handling the most violent, disruptive individuals in the system. Gang leaders who order hits from inside. Inmates who assault guards. People who are legitimately too dangerous to be in general population. What do you do with them?
That's the question, isn't it. And I think the honest answer is — the debate isn't really about whether you can separate someone who's a threat. It's about scale and duration and conditions. When you've got eighty thousand people in solitary, we're not talking about eighty thousand gang kingpins.
The data bears this out. A huge proportion of people in solitary confinement are there for minor rule infractions — talking back to a guard, having contraband like an extra food item, failing to make their bed properly. There's also the mental health dimension, which is particularly grim. People with serious mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder — are disproportionately placed in solitary because their symptoms are perceived as disciplinary problems. So you take someone who's already struggling with reality and you put them in a box that makes reality even harder to grasp.
That's not a feedback loop. That's a downward spiral with a door lock on it.
It gets worse. There's a physical dimension to this that doesn't get as much attention. Prolonged isolation messes with your immune system. There's research showing that loneliness and social isolation increase inflammatory markers in the body. Cortisol levels go up and stay up. People in solitary have higher rates of hypertension, cardiovascular problems, digestive issues. The body keeps the score, as they say.
The body keeps the score while the warden keeps the key.
that's actually a pretty good summary. And there's something else — the sensory deprivation aspect. Most solitary confinement units are not silent. They're actually incredibly loud. You get the constant clanging of doors, people shouting through walls, the ventilation system humming. But it's unstructured noise. Your brain can't filter it the way it filters a normal soundscape. So you're simultaneously overstimulated and understimulated. It's a uniquely maddening combination.
White noise that's not white noise. Industrial Muzak from hell.
I saw one account from a former inmate who described it as "living inside a speaker that's playing a car crash on loop." And the lack of natural light is its own form of torture. Your body's entire temporal architecture — melatonin production, body temperature regulation, alertness cycles — all of it depends on light cues. When you're under artificial fluorescent light twenty-three hours a day, that system breaks down. People lose track of whether it's day or night, which sounds almost poetic until you realize it means your body doesn't know when to sleep, when to be alert, when to eat.
You're disoriented in time, disoriented in space, disoriented in self. What's left?
And that's what the most disturbing accounts describe — this sense of ego dissolution. People talk about feeling like they're disappearing, like they're not sure they exist anymore. There's a term in the literature: "derealization." The world stops feeling real. Other people stop feeling real. You stop feeling real.
Which brings us to the controversial part of the question. Why is this still happening if we know all of this?
I think there are a few reasons, and they're not all equally valid, but they're all real factors. The first is bureaucratic inertia. Solitary confinement has been a standard tool in American prisons since the early nineteenth century — the first purpose-built solitary prison was Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, opened in eighteen twenty-nine. The whole idea was that isolation would lead to reflection and repentance. The word "penitentiary" comes from penitence.
That's grimly ironic given what we now know.
It really is. The Quaker reformers who designed Eastern State genuinely believed they were being humane — replacing corporal punishment with quiet contemplation. But what they found, within just a few years, was that people weren't becoming penitent. They were becoming psychotic. By the eighteen forties, there were already reports of high rates of mental breakdown among solitary inmates. Charles Dickens visited Eastern State in eighteen forty-two and wrote that the system was "rigid, strict, and hopeless," and that it inflicted "immense amounts of torture and agony." He said no one who witnessed it would ever forget it.
We've known this for almost two hundred years. That's not inertia. That's something more deliberate.
Yet the practice didn't end — it just went underground for a while and then came roaring back. The modern era of mass solitary confinement really starts in the nineteen eighties and nineties, with the rise of supermax prisons. Pelican Bay in California, opened in nineteen eighty-nine. ADX Florence in Colorado, the federal supermax, opened in nineteen ninety-four. These facilities were designed from the ground up to isolate inmates nearly completely.
What's the actual day look like in one of those places?
Let me walk you through it. Cell is typically about seven by twelve feet — smaller than a parking space. Concrete bed with a thin mattress. Stainless steel toilet and sink combo. A small slot in the door where meals are passed through. One hour a day in a concrete exercise cage, which is basically another slightly larger box, sometimes with a grate overhead that lets in a patch of sky. No contact visits — all visitation through glass. No educational programs. No group activities. No shared meals.
And this is the thing that I think the public doesn't quite grasp. It's not just being alone. It's being alone in a space that is deliberately designed to be as barren as possible. Every surface is hard. There's no color. There's no texture. The lighting never changes. The temperature is controlled by someone else. You have no agency over anything — when you eat, when you sleep, when the light is on or off. It's the systematic removal of every choice, every variation, every moment of autonomy.
It's sensory starvation plus decision starvation.
And the decision starvation part is crucial. There's research showing that having even trivial choices — what to eat, when to stand up, which direction to face — is essential to maintaining a sense of self. When every decision is made for you, the self starts to feel like a ghost. People describe it as "becoming a piece of furniture in your own life.
We've got a punishment that was designed by Quakers as an act of mercy, that Dickens condemned in the eighteen forties, that the UN now calls torture, and that produces measurable, lasting psychological damage. And yet it's used on eighty thousand Americans today. What's the argument that keeps it alive?
Safety is the big one. Prison officials will tell you — and again, I'm not dismissing this — that solitary confinement is necessary to protect both staff and other inmates from the most violent individuals. And there's a subset of the prison population that poses an ongoing threat. But here's the thing: the research on whether solitary actually improves prison safety is mixed at best. Some studies show that the threat of solitary acts as a deterrent and that removing violent individuals reduces assaults. Other studies show that the grievance and trauma produced by solitary actually fuels more violence, both inside and after release. It's not a settled empirical question.
We're betting eighty thousand people's sanity on an unproven deterrent effect.
That's one way to put it. Another argument is cost, though it cuts both ways. Solitary confinement is significantly more expensive than general population housing — estimates range from two to three times as much per inmate. More staff, more specialized infrastructure, more medical and psychological monitoring. But the counterargument from administrators is that the alternative — allowing violent individuals to remain in general population — creates costs of its own in injuries, lawsuits, and staff turnover.
What about the countries that have moved away from it? What does that look like?
It's a mixed picture. Norway is the famous example — their maximum security prisons look more like college dorms than what we picture. Inmates have their own rooms with furniture and windows. Guards are unarmed and trained in conflict resolution. The recidivism rate is dramatically lower than in the US. But it's also true that Norway is a small, wealthy, homogeneous country with a completely different social context. You can't just copy-paste their model onto the American system.
No, but you can look at specific practices. What are the concrete alternatives to solitary?
One is step-down programs — when someone is separated for violent behavior, there's a clear, structured pathway back to general population, with increasing privileges and social contact at each step. Another is therapeutic segregation units, which are still separate from general population but include group therapy, educational programming, and regular human interaction. Colorado has been experimenting with this — they closed their solitary unit at one facility and replaced it with a program that includes out-of-cell time, group activities, and mental health treatment. Early results showed a significant reduction in violence and self-harm.
We haven't even touched on that.
It's one of the darkest parts of this. Rates of self-harm and suicide are dramatically higher in solitary confinement than in general population. Human Rights Watch has documented cases of people cutting themselves, swallowing razors, setting themselves on fire. In extreme cases, people gouge out their own eyes. It's called "auto-enucleation" and it's one of those things that you read about and your brain just doesn't want to process.
Gouging out their own eyes.
It's rare, but it happens often enough that it's a documented phenomenon in the psychiatric literature on solitary confinement. The theory is that it's a response to the overwhelming sensory deprivation — the person is trying to take control of the one sensory input they have left, or they're experiencing command hallucinations telling them to do it. Either way, it's a level of psychological disintegration that's hard to even comprehend.
These are the people we're releasing back into society.
If they survive. And many don't. The suicide rate in solitary confinement is something like five to ten times higher than in general population, depending on which study you look at. There was a deeply reported Mother Jones investigation a few years back that found that suicides in solitary were often preceded by weeks or months of desperate pleas for help — letters, verbal requests, hunger strikes — that were ignored or treated as manipulation.
That's the part that I keep coming back to. It's not just that the punishment causes damage. It's that the system is structured in a way that makes it nearly impossible to respond to that damage in real time. The same isolation that's causing the breakdown also hides it from view.
The people who are in the best position to see it — the correctional officers — are not trained as mental health professionals. They're trained in security. So you've got a system where the frontline responders to a psychological crisis are people whose primary job is maintaining order. The incentives are all wrong.
Misaligned incentives in a concrete box. That's practically the subtitle of this episode.
Let me add one more layer to this, because it connects to something broader. There's a racial dimension. Black and Latino inmates are disproportionately placed in solitary confinement, even when controlling for the nature of their offenses and their behavior inside. A Yale Law School study found that Black inmates were more likely to be sent to solitary for subjective infractions — things like "disrespect" or "creating a disturbance" — while white inmates tended to be sent for more clearly defined rule violations. The discretion built into the system amplifies existing biases.
It's not just cruel, it's cruelly applied unevenly. That's a compounding problem.
That's why the reform movement has gained so much traction in the last decade. There's been a real shift. States like New York, Colorado, and California have passed legislation limiting the use of solitary confinement, particularly for vulnerable populations — juveniles, pregnant women, people with serious mental illness. The federal First Step Act, passed in twenty eighteen, included provisions restricting solitary for juveniles in federal custody. President Trump signed that into law.
That's worth noting.
And it's been one of the rare areas where you've seen cooperation across the aisle. You've got the ACLU and the Koch brothers' organization both pushing for solitary reform. The arguments are different — civil liberties versus fiscal conservatism — but the policy conclusion is the same. This is expensive, it's ineffective, and it's inhumane.
The unholy alliance of people who care about human dignity and people who care about the balance sheet.
And I think that's actually the most promising path forward. If reform depended solely on moral arguments, it would be a much harder sell. But when you can walk into a state legislature and say, "This costs you three times as much per inmate and it makes recidivism worse," that gets attention from people who don't care about the moral dimension at all.
Where are we now, in practice? What's the trend line?
The trend is downward, but slowly. The number of people in solitary has declined from its peak in the late nineties and early two thousands. Several states have closed entire solitary units. But eighty thousand people is still eighty thousand people. And the federal Bureau of Prisons has been slower to reform than many state systems. ADX Florence is still operating. The practice is still widespread.
Most Western European countries have either banned prolonged solitary confinement outright or restricted it so heavily that it's essentially banned in practice. Germany limits it to a maximum of four weeks, with mandatory medical supervision. The UK has moved toward limiting it to twenty-one days for adults. Canada recently passed legislation limiting it to fifteen days, in line with the UN standard. The US is an outlier among developed nations.
The US being an outlier on incarceration is not exactly breaking news.
No, but it's worth being specific about the magnitude. The US incarceration rate is roughly five times the global average. The number of people in solitary is higher than the total prison population of most countries. It's not just that we do it more — it's that we do it at a scale that makes comparison almost meaningless.
Scale as a form of qualitative difference. Once you hit a certain number, it's not the same thing anymore.
And that connects to something I've been thinking about. Solitary confinement at a small scale, for short periods, targeted at dangerous individuals — you can have a reasonable debate about whether that's justified. But when it's applied to tens of thousands of people, for months or years, for minor infractions, to people who are already mentally ill — that's not the same practice. It's a different thing entirely.
The dosage makes the poison.
And the dosage in the American system is toxic. There's no question in the research literature about this. Every major medical and psychological association — the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association — has issued position statements calling for severe restrictions on solitary confinement. The AMA says it should be limited to no more than fifteen days and never used for people with serious mental illness. These aren't activist groups. These are doctors.
Doctors who have looked at the same evidence and reached the same conclusion. That's not a coincidence.
No, it's a consensus. And I think that's the thing I want listeners to take away from this. The debate about solitary confinement isn't really a debate anymore, at least not among people who have studied the evidence. The debate is between the evidence and the inertia of a massive system that's hard to change. The question isn't "does this cause harm." The question is "why do we keep doing it anyway.
That's the question that's harder to answer.
Because it's not about data anymore. It's about politics, and budgets, and unions, and public attitudes toward crime and punishment, and a whole set of cultural assumptions about what justice looks like. The data is clear. The will to act on it is what's missing.
If someone's listening to this and thinking — okay, what actually works? What's the alternative that doesn't put guards at risk and doesn't let violence go unchecked? What does the evidence say?
The evidence points toward what are called "therapeutic communities" or "restrictive housing alternatives." These are units that are still separate from general population — so you're still removing people who pose a threat — but they include structured programming, group interaction, mental health care, and a clear pathway back to less restrictive settings. The key difference is that they're designed to address the underlying behavior, not just warehouse the person until their sentence is up.
Address versus warehouse. That's the fork in the road.
It's a fork that costs money upfront but saves money downstream. Lower recidivism, fewer lawsuits, less staff burnout, fewer medical emergencies. The states that have actually implemented these alternatives are seeing results. Mississippi — not a state known for progressive criminal justice policy — reduced its solitary population by something like eighty-five percent and saw a decrease in prison violence.
Mississippi is not where you go looking for good news about prisons.
And that's why I find it encouraging. If Mississippi can do it, the argument that it's impossible elsewhere starts to look pretty thin.
We've got the psychological effects — hallucinations, paranoia, derealization, self-harm, suicide. We've got the physical effects — immune suppression, hypertension, circadian disruption. We've got the post-release effects — PTSD, social dysfunction, higher recidivism. We've got the international consensus, the medical consensus, the fiscal argument. And we've got working alternatives demonstrated in places as different as Norway and Mississippi.
That's a good summary.
That's the whole story, isn't it.
The "and yet" is the whole story.
I think the one thing I'd add — and this gets to the deeper philosophical question here — is that solitary confinement forces us to confront what we think punishment is for. Is it retribution? Is it deterrence? Is it rehabilitation? Is it incapacitation? Because solitary confinement is very good at exactly one of those things — incapacitation. It keeps a person from doing harm while they're inside. But it makes all the other goals worse. It doesn't deter. It doesn't rehabilitate. And as retribution, it inflicts a kind of damage that most people, if they really understood it, would find disproportionate to almost any offense.
Most people don't really understand it. That's part of the problem.
They don't. And I think that's why accounts from people who've been through it are so important. We talked about Kalief Browder. There are others — people who've written memoirs, given interviews, testified before legislatures. Their descriptions are more powerful than any study. The constant counting of days. The way time becomes elastic and interminable at the same time. The desperate strategies people develop to stay sane — reciting movie dialogue from memory, counting the cracks in the ceiling, having imaginary conversations that become more real than reality.
Building a whole world inside your head because the one outside is six feet by twelve.
Then being expected to rejoin the real world and function normally. It's an impossible ask.
Where does this leave us? If we're answering the prompt directly — what are the disturbing things that happen, and why is it controversial — I think the disturbing things are clear. The controversy is that we have a punishment that the evidence says is torture, that the medical establishment says causes lasting harm, that the international community says should be banned, and that we keep using anyway because the alternatives require political will that's in short supply.
That's the essence of it. And I'd add that the controversy is also about transparency. Most people have no idea what happens inside solitary confinement units. Prisons are closed institutions. The public doesn't see it. When you describe it — when you actually walk someone through what a day looks like, what a year looks like — the reaction is almost always shock. The controversy exists in the gap between what we imagine solitary confinement to be and what it actually is.
The gap between a time-out and a sensory deprivation chamber.
People picture a time-out. A boring room where you sit and think about what you did. That's not what this is. This is the systematic dismantling of a human being's relationship to reality.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In 1927, Australian radio astronomer John Gatenby Bolton was born. But the fact is this: amateur radio operators in the nineteen twenties occasionally picked up strange rhythmic signals they called "whistlers" — caused by lightning strikes traveling along Earth's magnetic field lines. One operator in 1923 described them as sounding like "a shell falling through infinite space." The recordings were lost, but the logbook entry survives in a private collection in Hargeisa, Somaliland — donated by a British colonial telegraph officer who had served there and kept meticulous notes on atmospheric interference.
...a shell falling through infinite space.
That's — I don't know whether to be unsettled or impressed.
That's our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, keeping us on our toes as always.
The question I keep coming back to is what happens when the people making decisions about solitary confinement are forced to sit in a cell themselves. Not as a stunt, but as a genuine exercise in understanding. I suspect the policy would change overnight.
I suspect you're right. And I think that's the open question we're left with — how do you generate the political will to change something that almost no one in power has ever experienced? The evidence is there. The alternatives exist. What's missing is the urgency.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want more episodes, we're at myweirdprompts dot com, or find us on Spotify. We'll be back next week.
Take care, everyone.
