The earliest historical account of solitary confinement is a shudder of horror. Writing around the year 100 CE, Roman historian Suetonius compiled a lengthy list of the cruelties of Tiberius, the second emperor of Rome. These included the rape and murder of children, throwing political opponents into the sea, and the public mutilation of the bodies of those put to death. Suetonius also noted that “some of those committed to prison were deprived not only of the consolation of study, but even of the opportunity of speech and conversation”—that is, they were in solitary confinement. In the eyes of an ancient Roman, this was a cruelty of par with the other aforementioned horrors.
Readers of Inquest will need little persuasion that Suetonius was right, that solitary confinement is a horror among horrors, a torture among tortures. Somehow, though, this remains a minority view in the culture at large. The average American at best misunderstands solitary confinement, but more likely doesn’t think about it at all. It is “the black box,” “the hole,” in which human beings are violently disappeared. With the blood, filth, and madness kept out of sight, the average citizen can imagine that solitary is what the prison claims it to be: no more than an administrative protocol, a safety measure, or a disciplinary tool reserved for “the worst of the worst.” They can imagine that solitary confinement means isolation, not evisceration.
Ending solitary confinement, to say nothing of ending mass incarceration, will require a radical change in the prevailing cultural winds. The history of solitary confinement offers material with which to work toward this end. My forthcoming book, An Experimental Box: A History of Solitary Confinement (expected from Harvard University Press in late 2026), chronicles the practice from ancient Rome to the contemporary Supermax. Throughout this history there is a drumbeat of condemnations. The practice has never been uncontroversial, and there has never been a moment when there were not voices recognizing it for what it is: torture.
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Inquest, finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
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Abolitionists ought to know this long history, in part precisely because it is so long. Solitary confinement is as old as the prison itself, and at every point in that long history, there have been those who spoke out. The devastation solitary wreaks upon bodies, minds, and souls has been understood and condemned, even as it was also exploited. Indeed, that is why it has been exploited.
In particular, I am struck by one remarkable fact: that these condemnations come from societies and historical moments that were not, generally speaking, known for their delicacy about violence. These were times of public executions (often of a most grisly kind), torture, slavery, and wars of imperial conquest. These, too, were not unquestioned, but the point is that—even in ages accustomed to the gore of the gladiatorial games or death by drawing and quartering—solitary confinement stood out as a horror.
Our own time is certainly not without its violence, but we are far less clear-eyed, it would seem, about the violence of solitary confinement. In short, the United States has some work to do if we wish to be as civilized as the Middle Ages.
Technically speaking, for the ancient Romans solitary confinement was not torture—it was something worse. According to their foremost legal scholar, Ulpian, torture meant “the torment and suffering of the body in order to elicit the truth.” In this sense, torture was a quite ordinary thing: not only was it perfectly legal, but it was an accepted part of the process of judicial fact-finding. It was governed by laws and safeguards, precisely because the Romans knew that it was res fragilis et periculosa, “a delicate and dangerous affair.”
What Tiberius did to the people Suetonius describes was something else altogether. There were no questions, there was no law. This was “the torment and suffering” of the mind, as well as the body, and served no purpose but pain. Truth had nothing to do with it.
Tiberius’s use of solitary confinement, his pointless cruelty, proved him to be a tyrant. This became a recurring detail of medieval histories and chronicles: to paint a king or a queen as a despot, a writer need only describe the solitude of their dungeons. In the middle of the sixth century, for example, the Byzantine historian Procopius penned his Secret History, a scathing account of the reign of Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, portraying them as corrupt and filled with the direst cruelty. Among the empress’s crimes, as Procopius tells it, was the labyrinthine prison built beneath the palace, a place “you might confuse with Tartaros”—the depths of the Greek underworld where the wicked were punished. Those Theodora regarded as her enemies languished there in total darkness, losing all sense of time. The only human presence they encountered was the guard, who behaved toward them as “one beast does another, mute to mute.” In the world above, it was taken for granted that the person who had thus disappeared had been murdered. Apparently it was unthinkable that a human being might be kept alive for so long in such complete isolation.
Nearly a thousand years later, the fifteenth-century French diplomat Philippe de Commynes recalled with horror the cells maintained by King Louis XI: “like cages of iron and others of wood, covered with plates of iron outside and in, with frightful bars, some eight feet broad and of the height of a man plus a foot.” According to Commynes, the bishop of Verdun, accused of plotting against the king, spent fourteen years in such an enclosure.
The first programs of solitary confinement—that is, the first written articulations of how to arrange it and what to do with it—were developed by medieval inquisitors for hunting heretics. They used isolation much as they used more familiar forms of torture: to compel confessions from those suspected of heresy. The inquisitors were the medieval world’s experts in torment. Their trust in solitary confinement reveals the depth of their knowledge of its extraordinary violence.
The most notorious of the medieval inquisitors is Bernard Gui, thanks to his cameo as a minor antagonist in Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. The real Gui, a French Dominican born in 1261, advised that those suspected of belonging to a sect called the Order of the Apostles “ought to be detained in prison until they have confessed the truth. Yet care must be taken that more than one of them are not held in a single cell at once, but rather each one by themselves, so that they cannot talk to one another.” He and generations of his colleagues often relied upon solitary confinement more than the thumbscrew or the rack, patiently waiting for solitude to overwhelm their captives.
Even dressed up in the technical terms of the canon lawyer and hidden behind the walls of an inquisitor’s prison, solitary confinement provoked outrage in medieval societies. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, for instance, the city of Carcassonne erupted in rebellion against the inquisitor Jean Galand for the inhuman prisons he used to torment his victims. These were prisons, it was alleged, that “could be more truly and justly called hell.”
It actually was hell for the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila. She once received a vision in which she briefly experienced the torments of hell itself. Transported out of this world and into the next, she found herself trapped in a filthy cupboard, doomed to eternal solitary confinement. She felt nothing but “agony of the soul, a crushing, a drowning, . . . such hopeless and wretched misery that I do not know how to describe it.” There were no demons, no fire and brimstone—she would have preferred that. There was only solitude until the end of time. Even God could not invent a worse torment than solitary confinement.
Others sought to make use of what Teresa found in hell. In 1627 the witch-hunters of Bamberg, in central Germany, built the first prison designed especially for solitary confinement. The Malefizhaus, “the witchcraft-house,” became infamous. Appeals to the Holy Roman emperor and the pope denounced “the narrowest prison,” whose cells were death to jailer and to captive alike. So fierce was the reaction that followed that it brought about the end of the witch-hunt itself and the eventual disappearance of the prison.
The chorus continued in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth, the twentieth. It continues still. Among the voices are Charles Dickens, who wrote of the solitary confinement inflicted upon people incarcerated at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” Stefan Zweig’s haunting 1942 novella A Chess Story imagines a totalitarian regime breaking a person by locking him in a comfortable yet utterly featureless room. Solitary is condemned in the findings of the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, the United Nations Committee on Torture, Amnesty International, and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture. And above all by the testimony of survivors, from Wole Soyinka to Albert Woodfox to Sarah Shourd.
The tradition that began with Suetonius is a promise and a demand. The promise is that people can understand. It requires no special expertise, no particular creed or commitment, to recognize what solitary confinement is. The reality of its awful violence will assert itself. The demand is that we call things by their rightful names. We must choose whether we shall trust Galand or his victims. Suetonius did not look away from the violence Tiberius had committed. Nor did Commynes. Nor did Procopius. Nor must we.
Image: Altansukh E / Unsplash
