Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement
Christopher W. Blackwell and Deborah Zalesne, with Kwaneta Harris & Terry Kupers
Pluto Press, $22.95 (paperback)
“To fully understand something,” write Christopher Blackwell and Deborah Zalesne in the opening of Ending Isolation, “we must immerse ourselves in it—hear the sounds, smell the smells, and absorb the environment as it truly is.”
From that premise, Blackwell, a journalist incarcerated in Washington State, and Zalesne, a professor at CUNY School of Law, embark to immerse the reader in the visceral horrors of solitary confinement. With coauthors Kwaneta Harris, a writer currently incarcerated in Texas, and psychiatrist Terry Kupers, they draw from the writings and experiences of dozens of incarcerated people across the country to describe the experience of forced isolation, as lived every day by tens of thousands of people in the United States—the “musty [cells], with wafts of mildew and urine,” the sleep-disrupting “deafening screams and banging from others experiencing a mental breakdown,” the “artificial lights that never, ever, turn off.”
“These things take on frightening significance,” writes Lacino Hamilton, who spent eleven years in solitary confinement and whose reflections are among the dozens contributed to the book by incarcerated authors and sensitively integrated by Blackwell’s team. The daily experience of isolation degrades the mind and any ability to understand reality. “You never see a clock. Time is for another world,” writes Blackwell. “There is only night and day, and both seem endless.”
Ending Isolation makes clear that we misunderstand solitary confinement if we think of it in terms of sensory deprivation. Rather, for those subjected to it, it is experienced as an all-consuming sensory overwhelm, even as one is deprived by it of human connection, sleep, peace, orientation in time, focus, memory, control, meaning-making, and, ultimately, sanity.
In addition to describing the experience of isolation through firsthand accounts, the authors of Ending Isolation provide a well-researched and authoritative account of solitary confinement’s history and its harms, its present and its future, a case which they build over the course of sixteen thematic chapters. These chapters tackle everything from a basic explanation of who gets sent to solitary (contrary to popular belief, it is not reserved for the “worst of the worst,” but is often used as a routine punishment to enforce arbitrary and often contradictory rules) to the impacts of climate change (“forty-four states don’t have air conditioning in all of their prisons, including ten states in the South.”).
The book’s collaborative structure—a mosaic of lived experience and summations of existing research, without privileging one over the other—provides a deeply human and informative case against solitary confinement. It presents a valuable summary of existing scientific literature and an equally valuable platform for the people experiencing isolation to tell their stories and create meaning, the very functions of connection that they are denied every day. But perhaps most importantly, it provides readers on the outside with a rare window in.
Upon finishing the book, one question looms large: How can such a barbaric practice—one that has been explicitly condemned by popes, U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, international human rights officials and human rights law; one whose earliest proponents promptly abandoned it and are now among its most vocal critics—survive well into the twenty-first century?
The question of why solitary confinement is still so pervasive is particularly perplexing because although barbaric, the practice, the book’s historical chapter explains, is not well-established in U.S. history. Rather, like so many of the current criminal legal system’s worst features, it is a product more of recent politics than of historical norms.
The earliest instances of its use in the United States date to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and specifically to two institutions in Philadelphia—Walnut Street Jail and Eastern State Penitentiary. The “Cherry Hill” model of punishment, as it was known, was inspired by Quaker philosophy and conceived of as a humane alternative to typical incarceration. Rather than warehousing incarcerated people in crowded facilities or subjecting them to harsher sanctions including the death penalty, forced isolation provided opportunity to sit in silence, reflect, and experience “penitence.”
As officials observed the devastating impacts of prolonged isolation, however, and its lack of reformatory benefits, they soon abandoned the practice altogether. The authors of Ending Isolation note a “consensus among all states that tried the Cherry Hill model between 1830 and 1880” that it was a failure and should end. An 1890 Supreme Court decision highlighted by the authors, In Re Medley, essentially codified that consensus, declaring “the experiment in Walnut Street Penitentiary” to be, in the words of Ending Isolation’s authors, “a failure and an impermissible form of torture.” As Alexis de Tocqueville famously lamented in 1883: “This experiment, of which such favourable results had been anticipated, proved fatal for the majority of the prisoners. It devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.”
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It was only far more recently, about 150 years later, during the War on Drugs and the growth of mass incarceration, that the use of solitary confinement was reborn in its modern incarnation. And today’s version—meted out not as a court-sanctioned and highly regulated punishment but as an administrative control technique shielded from meaningful accountability and transparency—is something new altogether.
The history of modern solitary confinement, and the history told in Ending Isolation, is often traced back to one event in 1983—the beginning of an indefinite lockdown of a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, following the killing of two guards. The following years saw solitary confinement built into the penal infrastructure of the United States through the construction of a number of supermax facilities; Ending Isolation counts supermax prisons in forty-four states by 2004.
Other scholars—notably Jules Lobel, whose historical account is also relayed in the book—trace the origins of supermax proliferation and modern solitary confinement not to a rise, or any singular incidence of, prison violence, but rather to “control of collective activity and radical thought.” It was, in other words, a parallel manifestation of the same racialized punishment paradigm that, at the same time, was fueling mass incarceration in broader society—a paradigm that Lobel writes originated from “the need to develop new mechanisms of social control to replace an old order thrown into turmoil by mass protests, litigation, and changing societal attitudes.”
If it is surprising that solitary confinement has survived into the twenty-first century without an especially robust pedigree, it is particularly puzzling that it has in fact thrived, serving so many functions and victimizing so many thousands of human beings.
Solitary confinement is in fact today a routine practice largely built into systems of prison management, both into the architecture of supermax facilities and into the administrative and disciplinary functions of facilities of all security levels, all the way down to local jails. What was reborn several decades ago as a weapon to suppress social upheaval is, today, as Blackwell writes, “a tool for prison officials to utilize when someone becomes an annoyance. Rather than proactively dealing with the person’s behavior, prison guards hide them away.”
Formal punishment barely scratches the surface of its official uses. Too numerous to fully list here, they include the “protection” of LGBT incarcerated people and young people; the “prevention” of suicide; retaliation against whistleblowers and journalists; attempting to limit the spread of disease, including COVID-19; the “treatment” of individuals in mental health crisis; and the subduing of a variety of real, perceived, or manufactured threats to administrative functioning, including gang affiliation.
It’s hard to know how many people are in solitary confinement at any given time in the United States because there is no centralized source of official data across jails, prisons, immigration detention, juvenile facilities, and psychiatric facilities. Nor is there a single legal definition in the United States of what constitutes solitary confinement, and euphemisms abound. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners defines solitary confinement as “the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact”—and, in all but “last resort,” prohibits it use. According to the watchdog group Solitary Watch and the Unlock the Box campaign, there were as of 2023 roughly 122,000 people in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails. Using self-reported data from mid-year 2019, that includes more than 80,000 people in state and federal prisons—more than 6 percent of the total prison population—and more than 42,000 people in jails, or more than 5.5 percent of the total jail population.
Those numbers, the group warns, are also undercounts, given that they rely on self-reported data, only include people who are “locked in a cell for 22 or more hours a day,” and exclude people in immigration detention. A recent report by Physicians for Human Rights found that just between April 2024 and May 2025, “more than 10,500 people were placed in solitary confinement in immigration detention centers across the United States.” That itself is a stark increase from previous years; in 2023, according to a 2025 report published in the Nevada Law Journal, 3,775 people were placed in solitary confinement, itself a record.
How has this idiosyncratic U.S. version of solitary-confinement-as-catchall-solution, younger than so many of its victims, been allowed to grow into and continue as what it is today? Like so many of the criminal legal system’s harshest practices, its proliferation—and the lack of a countervailing power to stop it—is part of a law-and-order politics that has swept all branches of government.
At the federal level, Congress has, time and time again for nearly a decade, considered legislation to place legal limits on the use of solitary confinement in federal facilities, but failed each time. Most recently, in July 2025, the End Solitary Confinement Act was reintroduced into both the Senate and the House. At the same time, Congress has been far more productive in passing legislation to strip incarcerated people of the right to challenge solitary confinement. Every day, federal laws such as the Prison Litigation Reform Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act block constitutional challenges against solitary confinement before they can even be properly evaluated by a judge or jury.
State legislatures have done more. The Unlock the Box campaign reported in 2023 that 500 bills relating to solitary confinement had been introduced in the previous five years, nearly a hundred of which had been signed into law since 2018. But these bills have, by and large, chipped away at solitary confinement piecemeal, or else unwittingly played into a game of three-dimensional chess with carceral officials, banning solitary confinement under one narrow set of terminology while permitting it to continue—unmodified or sometimes even worse—under others.
Judiciaries, too, hold responsibility. In individual cases, judges confronted with an iteration of a practice recognized by international law as torture routinely refuse to recognize it as such. Whether by willfully refusing to acknowledge isolation as solitary confinement or as a punishment at all, by downplaying the harms of solitary confinement (especially the psychological harms) and providing undue deference to prison administrators, or by erecting artificial obstacles to accountability (such as qualified immunity), judges have too often abdicated their responsibility to protect individual rights and liberties—to uphold law—in favor of institutional order.
This has occurred both in individual decisions, but also on a structural level. Judiciaries have constructed a common law legal system that makes it all but impossible for claims against solitary confinement to succeed. As the authors of Ending Isolation explain, legal challenges to solitary confinement typically are based on either the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment or the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections of due process (or, in some cases, the Americans with Disabilities Act). Claims citing the first often fail because either the court views the use of solitary as something other than a punishment or as insufficiently cruel to be a constitutional violation, or because the prison official was insufficiently “indifferent” to that suffering. Claims citing the Fourteenth Amendment often fail because courts have by and large decided that solitary confinement is just another part of a prison sentence—that once incarcerated, you don’t have a right not to be in solitary unless that extra deprivation of liberty on top of a prison sentence clears a high, vague bar.
These legal doctrines and decisions are not inevitable. They are decisions made every day that empower prison officials to lock people in isolation for days, weeks, months, and years at a time while building a legal infrastructure to block accountability and entrench the practice.
The greatest responsibility, however, lies with prison administrators and officials themselves. As Ending Isolation notes, it was prison officials who unilaterally ushered in the modern era of solitary confinement. Solitary confinement has been reborn in recent decades not as a legally sanctioned practice prescribed and circumscribed by a democratic legislature, but as an administrative management technique doled out by unelected officials, unaccountable to the public in any meaningful way and with virtually no checks on their authority. It is the administrators of the punishment who every day inflict the punishment as judge, jury, and executioner.
This, David Shapiro, now executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center, notes in a 2019 Harvard Law Review article, is a departure from the earliest days of solitary confinement, when it was a punishment handed down by a court with strict regulations. In solitary confinement’s earliest incarnations in Philadelphia, prison officials did not have the unchecked powers that they claim for themselves today. Rather, they were accountable to “a sophisticated system of checks and balances that limited the cruelty of isolation and the discretion of corrections officials.”
What’s needed to finally end the failed experiment of solitary confinement—more than any individual piece of legislation, court case, or executive action—is a broader cultural shift.
Modern solitary confinement has arisen amid modern paradigms of law and order, punishment, and racial control. In that, it’s far from alone. There is no shortage of harmful, ineffective, and relatively recent practices in the modern criminal legal system—extreme sentencing, militarized policing, mass surveillance, a litany of collateral consequences of incarceration—that have also grown specifically out of a half-century of law-and-order politics. Similarly, there is no shortage of reforms that have been widely recognized as just, effective, and necessary but have never been fully realized due to political whims—cash bail reform, drug decriminalization, parole reform, the death penalty, and an end to felony disenfranchisement, to name a few.
Solitary confinement must not be viewed in isolation. It is a feature of a political paradigm that has swept across all branches of government and rewritten the rules of law and politics for its own survival. It is just one of many harsh practices of our criminal legal system that our modern political and social era has made seem natural and necessary, but which is in fact experimental and entirely deleterious.
This is a fundamental truth that judges, legislators, and officials—all of whom exist within and are, to varying extents, products of that dominant culture—have not and cannot see. There is no shortage of court filings, research reports, and legislative advocacy materials citing the same statistics and studies that appear in the pages of Ending Isolation, often met with a court denial or general disinterest. It is exceptionally rare in the history of modern social change for a dominant paradigm or political culture to shift with an individual legal or policy effort, and solitary confinement is unlikely to be the exception.
The most pressing question, then—more than how to abolish solitary confinement—is how to altogether challenge the paradigm within which it exists and usher in a new politics to replace it.
With notable exceptions, what has been largely missing in the struggle to end solitary confinement over the years—often intentionally censored and excluded by officials—has been firsthand testimony. Herein lies the greatest contribution of Ending Isolation. Its personal testimonies are far more evocative than facts and figures alone. It provides a tremendous leap forward in the growing body of public testimony speaking to the routine tortures of solitary confinement.
It is, to be clear, not the first such collection. Last month marked one decade since the publication of Hell Is a Very Small Place, a collection of essays similarly weaving personal testimony and scientific literature to make the case against solitary confinement. In the years since, it has even become more likely—albeit still an exception—to find firsthand accounts of incarceration and solitary confinement in major media sources, from the New York Times to This American Life.
Perhaps this tidal shift is due to the proliferation of independent nonprofit media models that are willing to accept bylines from incarcerated authors; perhaps it is due to the tiresome work of a few hardworking writers, editors, and publishers who continue to push for a more informed, human conversation. Blackwell offers his own hypothesis in the opening pages of Ending Isolation: “With new technology, and the advent of tablets . . . that allow incarcerated people to message people on the outside . . . it has become easier for incarcerated people to tell their stories.” That is, it is principally because of the tireless advocacy of incarcerated people themselves.
It is only in the dark—because of its defining features of disconnection and isolation—that solitary confinement has been able to proliferate. By exposing the public to the lived realities and human experiences of solitary confinement, the writings of Blackwell, Harris, and incarcerated writers across the country might, in the long run, prove more decisive in ending solitary confinement than any scientific study, court case, or piece of legislation.
Image: Vincent Erhart / Unsplash
