There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged. They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this cluster of symptoms SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units of many supermax prisons. Prisoners have more direct ways of naming their experience. They call it “living death,” the “gray box,” or “living in a black hole.”

Advocates and experts in the field were invited to submit testimony on the psychological, ethical, social and economic issues raised by punitive isolation. Among the many contributors was Anthony Graves, who spent over 18 years on death row in Texas, most of them in solitary confinement, for a crime he did not commit. Graves describes his isolation as a form of “emotional torture.” Two years after his exoneration and release, he still feels trapped in isolation: “I am living amongst millions of people in the world today, but most of the time I feel alone. I cry at night because of this feeling. I just want to stop feeling this way, but I haven’t been able to.”

We tend to assume that solitary confinement is reserved for “the worst of the worst”: violent inmates who have proved themselves unwilling or unable to live in the general population. But the truth is that an inmate can be sent to the hole for failing to return a meal tray, or for possession of contraband (which can include anything from weapons to spicy tortilla chips).

Originally posted by Superhans
1. That he spent 18 years in solitary....

....This little space you see, this is where we are forced to spend the rest of our lives. Five days a week we are allowed out into bigger cages, either inside or outside where we can see slivers of sky through steel bars, for 2 hours of recreation. The rest of out time we are in this cage. Measuring about 7 feet by 11 feet it is smaller then most bathrooms in homes. Could YOU spend years of your life locked in your bathroom? Ofcourse, what this picture doesn't show you are the ceilings that leak when it rains, so you wake up with a floor of water, and your property damaged. It doesn't show you the showers that are mildewed and always smell of urine. It doesn't show you how filthy the walkway is after the inmates who are suppose to clean only only pass over it with a mop soaked in dirty brown water....