The data presented herein attempts to paint a picture of those conditions through quantitative and qualitative details documenting the length of that confinement and the features of those conditions. Photographs presented throughout the site also depict actual solitary cells in U.S. prisons that have reported some of this data. Together, we hope these images and facts can help visitors to this website better understand this reality and the number of people experiencing it on a daily basis.
But we also recognize that no written report, table or graph, or even photographic depiction can reproduce the experience of isolation. This project would be incomplete without the voices of people who have experienced solitary firsthand and those who have considered their stories most closely. This page presents direct quotes from individuals who have published descriptions of their own time in solitary confinement.
In 1996, when I was sixteen, a fifteen-year-old friend and I carjacked a man in Virginia. Shortly after being arrested, I confessed...It should not have been a surprise to anyone that part of what I got out of my time in prison was nearly a year and a half of solitary confinement” . . . “I was denied a mattress, a pillow, or a sheet. Given only a small gray blanket, I slept on a concrete slab covered in dried mucus and the grime of years without cleaning. The guy in the cell across from me spent all day talking to himself. Arguing with himself. Guards and nurses alike ignored his disintegration.”
-Reginald Dwayne Betts, Yale Law Journal, January 2016
Mr. Betts, now a lawyer, poet, and author, was formerly incarcerated in VirginiaThere is always the misery. If you manage to escape it yourself for a time, there will ever be plenty around in others for you to sense; and though you’ll be unable to look into their eyes and see it, you might hear it in the nighttime when tough guys cry not-so-tough tears that are forced out of them by the unrelenting stress and strain that life in SHU is an exercise in.”. . . “You will never hear words more despicable or see mouth wars more insane than what occurs all the time in SHU, not anywhere else in the world, because there would be serious violence before any person could speak so much foulness for so long.”. . .“I had wet toilet paper stuffed hard into both ears, socks folded up and pressed into my ears, a pillow wrapped around the sides and back of my head covering my ears, and a blanket tied around all that to hold everything in place, lying in bed praying for sleep. But still the noise was incredible, a thunderous cacophony of insanity, sleep impossible.”. . .“Had I known in 1987 that I would spend the next quarter-century in solitary confinement, I would have certainly killed myself. If I took a month to die and spent every minute of it in severe pain, it seems to me that on a balance that fate would still be far easier to endure than the last twenty-five years have been.
-William Blake, Solitary Watch, March 2013
Mr. Blake served more than 34 years in solitary confinement in New York State before transfer to general population in 2021Another time I was sent to solitary came four months after being in Danbury. I received a call from my case manager urging me to call home. … I rushed to the phone and called home and was told that my baby girl was in a bad accident … While trying to calm down and get my sister to stop crying, my daughter ended up calling my sister while I was on the phone, and she immediately merged the call in where I could talk with my daughter. … My fifteen minutes for the call were up, and I had to wait 30 minutes to use the phone again. … I then noticed one of the officers coming towards me and said I needed to go to the lieutenant’s office. When I got there, I was told I made a 3-way call – because my daughter had called into my sister when I was on the phone with her. The lieutenant read to me what is called an incident report, and then he gave me a piece of paper and asked me to turn around. I was placed in handcuffs and escorted to the SHU with no warning, no second chance, no nothing.
- Nicole Davis, Written Testimony Submitted to Senate Committee on the Judiciary, April 2024
Ms. Davis, Founder of the Talk2MeFoundation for children with incarcerated parents, spent a total of one year in solitary confinement during her incarceration of over 13 years in federal prisons.
“When you have no one to talk to inside a grey, dingy cell with its blacked out window, you start talking to yourself, then you think your inner self at least deserves an answer, so I began answering myself. I asked myself what if I got swallowed into this black hole in my cell and just disappeared. I asked myself if it would be better off for my family if this thorn in their side went away for them so they can truly forget me. The best way I can describe being in this small box when life is going on without you is you are dead and the cell is your coffin. Everything goes on without and around you. But you stay the same...stagnant.”
-Jeanne DiMola, Written Testimony Submitted to Senate Subcommittee, Feb. 2014
Ms. DiMola spent one year of a six-year federal sentence in solitary confinement“I didn’t know guards would feed me like a dog, through a slot in my door. Instead of providing basic nutrients, the food sometimes contained rat feces, broken glass, or the sweat of the inmate who cooked it.” . . . “I lived behind a steel door, with filthy mesh-covered windows looking out to the run; my only window to the outside world was a tiny one on the top of the back wall of my cell.” . . .“Some people say that my exoneration, and those of 11 other Texas death row inmates, proves that our system works: the system freed me before I was executed. These people don’t understand (among other things) that a death sentence for an innocent person in Texas comes with the physical, emotional, and psychological torture of solitary confinement...Because Texas did not do that for me, I suffer from ongoing problems –body and mind. I’m innocent and I’m free, but I pay for my freedom with mood swings, emotional breakdowns, veins calcified with plaque, sleepless nights, loneliness, and difficulty being in large crowds. And it was even worse for other guys.”
-Anthony Graves, Testimony to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee, June 2012
Mr. Graves served more than 18 years in solitary confinement on death row in Texas before he was exonerated in 2010“I witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television. Just so they could have a semblance of freedom. Just so they could feel human again.”. . .“On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.”. . .“I served 18 consecutive years in isolation because each minor disciplinary infraction —like having a magazine that had another prisoner’s name on the mailing label —added an additional six months to my time in solitary confinement. The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.”
-Ian Manuel, New York Times, March 2021
Mr. Manuel served 18 years in solitary confinement in the Florida prison system starting at age 15“I do not have the words to convey the years of mental, emotional, and physical torture I have endured. I ask that for a moment you imagine yourself standing at the edge of nothingness, looking at emptiness. The pain and suffering this isolation causes go beyond mere description.”
-Albert Woodfox, Statement to Supporters, October 2013
Mr. Woodfox, author of the biography Solitary, was held in solitary confinement for more than 40 years at Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. He was released from prison in 2016 and died August 4, 2022