Seeing Solitary home

What is Solitary?

solitary confinement cell
Photo courtesy of the ACLU
A solitary confinement cell at Arizona State Prison Complex - Eyman, 2021

Living in solitary confinement imposes profound and radical limitations on interaction with other people and activities. Sources of information include first-hand accounts by people who have lived in solitary confinement.

Descriptions come from many other sources, including judicial decisions issued when people challenge their conditions of confinement. For example, in November of 2022, a federal appellate court, responding to Angelo Clark, who was held in James T. Vaughn Correctional Center (JTVCC) in Delaware and alleging prison officials failed to “consider his mental illness in determining the cause of ‘the alleged rule violations’ or the appropriateness of sanction,’” described solitary confinement in that facility in 2016.

The [“Secure Housing Unit” or solitary] cells are approximately eleven by eight feet with solid doors and two four-inch-wide windows, one of which faced the hallway. . . The cell lights were on from approximately 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., which meant they were off for approximately six hours a day. Meals were delivered without human contact through a slot in the door. . . Solitary confinement meant Clark was deprived of all opportunities to engage in “normal” human interaction; he was not allowed to work and prohibited from participating in educational programs or religious services. . . . He was permitted only four phone calls and four visitors per month.

-Clark v. Coupe, No. 21-2310, 2022 WL 17246324, *4

(3d Cir. Nov. 28, 2022)

That account parallels what the U.S. Supreme Court described to be conditions in Ohio’s Supermax in 2005.

Inmates must remain in their cells, which measure 7 by 14 feet, for 23 hours per day. A light remains on in the cell at all times, though it is sometimes dimmed, and an inmate who attempts to shield the light to sleep is subject to further discipline. During the one hour per day that an inmate may leave his cell, access is limited to one of two indoor recreation cells. . . . [The] cells have solid metal doors with metal strips along their sides and bottoms which prevent conversation or communication with other inmates. All meals are taken alone in the inmate's cell instead of in a common eating area. Opportunities for visitation are rare and in all events are conducted through glass walls. It is fair to say . . . inmates are deprived of almost any environmental or sensory stimuli and of almost all human contact.

-Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209, 214 (2005)

As these brief excerpts reflect, prison systems used lighting as a mechanism of oppressive control. This light-all-the-time is the flip of a prior practice. Beyond the middle of the twentieth century, many prisons “disciplined” prisoners by confining people in “dark cells” or “quiet cells” – dungeon-like confinement with no light at all. In the last several decades, many prison systems use artificial light all the time, and often provide no access to natural lighting. For example, in 2021, thirty jurisdictions responded to some survey questions about artificial and direct natural lighting, ten of which reported that the lights in solitary confinement cells were on at night and that people did not have control during all of the day over lighting in cells. Those questions were part of others trying to understand the dimensions of life in solitary. We asked states and the federal Bureau of Prisons about the rules, such as whether people had time out of cell for taking showers, for mental and physical health services, for exercise, for meals, and group programming. The reminder is that the policies do not necessarily describe what happens. Having regulations describing access to showers or some form of exercise three times a week does not mean that people get to shower or exercise. Implementation depends on whether staff make happen what the official policies provide.

As to those rules, in the 2021 survey, twenty-nine jurisdictions reported that they permitted people in solitary confinement to leave cells between three and seven times per week to exercise. People did not do so in groups but individually. Thirty jurisdictions responded that they limited the number of showers a person could take, and nineteen capped this number at three per week. Six jurisdictions reported that people in solitary confinement were not allowed to be in a group during any of the time they had out of cell.

Angola Camp J Yard Cage
Photo courtesy of Andrea Armstrong
Camp J Yard Cage at Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola)

In the United States, solitary confinement can be traced back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where in Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail, in the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York, and in Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, staff enforced strict codes of silence and isolation. Unlike contemporary explanations that solitary confinement is needed for punishment and management, early proponents justified its use as offering convicted criminals redemption through contemplation. See, for example, Ashley T. Rubin & Keramet Reiter, Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation: Revisiting the History of American Solitary Confinement, 43 L. & Soc. Inquiry 1604 (2018).

Scandals of violence to enforce the silence and tragedies of deaths and of people losing their mental health prompted abandonment of total isolation. Prison officials in the nineteenth century modified the rigid silences of Auburn and Eastern State Penitentiary. Peter Scharff Smith, Solitary Confinement—Effects and Practices from the Nineteenth Century until Today, in Solitary Confinement: Effects, Practices, and Pathways 21, 33–37 (eds. Jules Lobel and Peter Scharff Smith 2019); see also Eastern State Penitentiary, Research.

The recognition of solitary’s harms made its way into U.S. Supreme Court case law in 1890. In the decision of In re Medley, 134 U.S. 160 (1890), the Court discussed the oppressiveness of isolation in the context of considering James Medley’s argument that Colorado’s holding him in isolation violated the Ex Post Facto Clause because the statute mandating solitary confinement for capital offenders had been enacted after Medley’s conviction of a capital offense. The Court wrote that isolation put some prisoners into a “semi-fatuous” condition and rendered others “insane.”

Yet prison officials continued to put individuals into isolation as a punishment (disciplinary segregation) or for management (administrative segregation) and, on occasion, as “protective custody.” At times, many people have been crammed into one small cell for days or months. Descriptions of conditions in the 1960s in California and in Arkansas can be found in Jordan v. Fitzharris, 257 F. Supp. 674, 676 (N.D. Cal. 1966), and in Holt v. Sarver, 300 F. Supp. 825 (E.D. Ark. 1969).

As U.S. prison populations grew in the 1970s and thereafter, prison officials expanded their use of solitary confinement. Ryan T. Sakoda & Jessica T. Simes, Solitary Confinement and the U.S. Prison Boom, Crim. Just. Pol'y Rev. 1 (2019. Moreover, some states built facilities known as “supermax” prisons dedicated entirely to isolation. Daniel P. Mears, Urban Inst. Justice Policy Ctr., Evaluating the Effectiveness of Supermax Prisons 4 (2006; John J. Gibbons & Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, Vera Institute of Justice, Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, 22 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 385–562 (Jan. 2006).

Many individuals and groups have challenged conditions in solitary confinement through a variety of means – including hunger strikes, protests, and lawsuits. Many social scientists have documented its harms.

High-profile examples of protests from within prisons include strikes at the Pelican Bay Prison in California and in U.S. military detention at Guantånamo Bay. One account of the harms comes from Albert Woodfox, who detailed more than forty years in isolation in Louisiana in his memoir, Solitary.

Lawsuits are another source of information and of arguments that U.S. law requires changes. In the mid-1990s, people held in Pelican Bay, California challenged the grievous conditions of confinement. After a lengthy trial, a federal district court held in Madrid v. Gomez, 889 F. Supp. 1146 (N.D. Cal. 1995) that placing people with serious mental illness into solitary confinement violated their constitutional rights.

Litigation efforts intersect with social science and medical research that documents the harms of isolation. Most experts agree that deprivations of sociability have brutal effects. See Istanbul Statement of the Use and Effect of Solitary Confinement, adopted Dec. 9, 2007, appended to Manfred Nowark, Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture of 28 July 2008, U.N. Doc A/63/175, 18 and Annex (22). One summary concluded that solitary confinement caused “a wide range of harmful psychological effects, including increases in negative attitudes and affect, insomnia, anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, loss of control, aggression, rage, paranoia, hopelessness, lethargy, depression, emotional breakdowns, self-mutilation, and suicidal impulses.” Craig Haney & Mona Lynch, Regulating Prisons of the Future: A Psychological Analysis of Supermax and Solitary Confinement, 23 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 477, 530 (1997). Moreover, to adjust to long-term isolation, individuals developed what would otherwise be pathological behaviors that made difficult a return to normal human sociability. Craig Haney, Solitary Confinement, Loneliness, and Psychological Harm, in Solitary Confinement 138-39 (2019). This form of “social death” resulted in grief and loneliness. See also Solitary by Terry Allen Kupers.

One focus has been the impact of sensory deprivation when an individual is limited to a small space for long periods of time and given no variation of experiences. Craig Haney, Restricting the Use of Solitary Confinement, 1 Ann. Rev. Criminology 285, 294 (2018); see also Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal, and Public Safety Consequences: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on the Constitution, Civil Rights & Human Rights of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary_, 112th Cong. 75 (2012) (prepared statement of Dr. Craig Haney). Another focus is the impact of banning human interaction and touch. Craig Haney, Restricting the Use of Solitary Confinement, 1 Ann. Rev. Criminology 285, 297- 298 (2018); see also Craig Haney, The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement: A Systematic Critique 47 Crime & Just., 365, 371–75 (2018). A 1983 study found that profoundly isolated prisoners became hypersensitive to external stimuli and developed difficulties with concentration and memory. Stuart Grassian, Psychopathological Effects of Solitary Confinement, 140 Am. J. Psychiatry 1450, 1452–53 (1983). Some also experienced visual and aural hallucinations. Id. at 1452. Later research, based on self-reports and on interviews, found similar effects. Stuart Grassian, Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement, 22 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 325, 347–54 (2006); Haney, The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement: A Systematic Critique, at 371–74. This body of work argues that an “isolation syndrome” can be identified. Grassian, Psychopathological Effects of Solitary Confinement, at 1453. One summary, presented in a 2016 amicus filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, came from health care experts. See Brief of Amici Curiae Professors and Practitioners of Psychiatry and Psychology in Support of Petitioner, Prieto v. Clarke, 780 F.3d 245 (4th Cir. 2015), cert. denied, Prieto v. Clarke, 136 S. Ct. 319 (2015) (no. 15-31). These experts argued that, “while mentally ill prisoners are particularly susceptible to these harms, solitary confinement affects even psychologically resilient individuals,” putting all prisoners “at significant risk of severe psychological harm.” Id. at 6.

Another effort analyzed data from 2004 of mentally-ill prisoners held in solitary confinement in New York prisons. That research reported that more than “half (53%) of the inmates with mental illness . . . . interviewed in disciplinary lockdown reported previous suicide attempts” and “40% reported committing an act of self-harm during their current incarceration.” Correctional Ass’n of N.Y., Mental Health in the House of Corrections: A Study of Mental Health Care in New York State Prisons 3, 59 (2004). An observational study of individuals detained in New York City’s jails between 2010 and 2013 found that “acts of self-harm were strongly associated with assignment of inmates to solitary confinement. Inmates punished by solitary confinement were approximately 6.9 times as likely to commit acts of self-harm.” Fatos Kaba, Andrea Lewis, Sarah Glowa-Kollisch, James Hadler, David Lee, Howard Alper, Daniel Selling, Ross MacDonald, Angela Solimo, Amanda Parsons, & Homer Venters, Solitary Confinement and Risk of Self-Harm Among Jail Inmates, 104 Am. J. Pub. Health 442, 445 (2014). That study had considered 244,600 incarcerations, of which more than seven percent had been exposed to solitary confinement. See Homer Venters, Mythbusting Solitary Confinement in Jail, in Solitary Confinement 173–75 (2019). Moreover, the populations exposed to solitary confinement in this analysis were disproportionately people of color, as has been evident in other studies as well. Id. at 176–77.

By 2020, health care experts, relying on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration metric of “harms-to-benefits” for medications and medical devices, concluded that solitary confinement was “inappropriate for use with humans.” Brie Williams & Cyrus Ahalt, First Do No Harm: Applying the Harm-to-Benefits Patient Safety Framework to Solitary Confinement, in Solitary Confinement 153, 158 (2019). Part of that analysis drew on research that high rates of solitary confinement did not predict lower institutional violence. Furthermore, prison staff working in such environments had higher rates of household violence, ill health, and suicide than did other staff.

Studies of solitary confinement in particular prison systems include NYCLU, Trapped Inside: The Past, Present, and Future of Solitary Confinement in New York (Oct. 28, 2019), and ACLU Tex., A Solitary Failure: The Waste, Cost, and Harm of Solitary Confinement in Texas (Feb. 15, 2015). Efforts to generate reforms are documented in Alison Shames, Jessa Wilcox & Ram Subramanian, Vera Inst. of Justice, Solitary Confinement: Common Misconceptions and Emerging Safe Alternatives (May 2015).

Two aspects of federal constitutional law – the Eighth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment due process protections – have been invoked to limit the use of solitary confinement. Illustrative is the Madrid case discussed above, holding that putting people with mental health challenges into solitary confinement is “cruel and unusual punishment,” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. More recently, Porter v. Clarke addressed conditions on Virginia’s death row, where individuals had spent years “alone, in a small . . . cell” with “no access to congregate religious, educational, or social programming.” Relying on evidence that such long-term solitary confinement posed “an objective risk of serious psychological and emotional harm to inmates,” the district court held, and the Circuit affirmed, that the conditions violated the Eighth Amendment. As that federal appellate court explained, this form of solitary confinement “posed a substantial risk of serious psychological and emotional harm” and “State Defendants were deliberately indifferent to that risk.” Porter v. Clarke, 923 F.3d 348 (4th Cir. 2019), as amended (May 6, 2019), reh’g en banc denied (Jul. 26, 2019); see also Mary Marshall, The Promise of Porter? Porter v. Clarke and its Potential Impact on Solitary Confinement Litigation, 120 Colum. L. Rev. F. 67 (2020).

Another lawsuit challenging the use of solitary confinement at Pelican Bay was Ashker v. Governor of California, which ended with a settlement; the federal court approved a class-wide agreement requiring the reduction by hundreds of the number of people held in isolation and changes in the conditions of those remaining. Settlement Agreement, Ashker v. Governor of California, (N.D. Cal. Aug. 31, 2015) (C 09-05796 CW). Behavior, rather than being assumed to belong to “security threat groups” (gangs), was to be the predicate for placement. As a result, about 2,000 individuals were to be moved to general population, as were individuals who had spent more than ten years in solitary confinement. Furthermore, placements were not to be indefinite, and the state was to provide step-down programs and social contact. Disagreements thereafter about implementation of that agreement have brought the case back to court. Ashker v. Brown, Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.

Several other cases address subpopulations such as people with distinct health challenges, juveniles, and individuals with capital sentences. Two lawsuits involving prisoners in Pennsylvania are illustrative. A 2015 resolution responded to Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania v. Wetzel, alleging that the state’s Department of Corrections kept people with serious mental illness in solitary confinement, that they cycled in and out, and that such treatment led to their deterioration. See Complaint of Petitioners at 18, Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania. v. Wetzel, 1:13-cv-00635-JEJ (M.D. Pa. 2015. The settlement barred the Department of Corrections from using solitary confinement for individuals with disabilities (except in narrowly-defined circumstances); ruled out placements based on acts of self-harm; created protections against repeat assignments; and, for individuals held in “secure residential treatment units,” required that the prisoners had 20 hours of out-of-cell time per week, of which half was structured, and that such individuals not remain for longer than 30 days. For additional terms of the settlement, see Settlement Agreement and General Release, Disability Rights Network of Pa. v. Wetzel, 1:13-cv-00635-JEJ (M.D. Pa. 2015). Another consent agreement, Reid v. Wetzel, responded to claims on behalf of individuals with capital sentences, whom Pennsylvania had held in solitary confinement. In November of 2019, the state agreed to provide at least 42.5 hours of out-of-cell time per week and accord these prisoners the same “rights and privileges” for phone calls and contact visits that were available in general population. The settlement agreement was finalized in April 2020. Settlement Agreement, 13, Reid v. Wetzel, No. 18-CV-0176 (M.D. Pa. 2018). For the complaint, filed in January 2018 by the ACLU, Abolitionist Law Center, and pro bono council, see Class Action Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, 1:18-cv-00176-JEJ, (M.D. Pa. Jan. 25, 2018),

In addition to constitutional law claims, some cases have challenged isolation as violating individuals’ rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, Armstrong v. Brown, 4:94-cv-02307, 2015 WL496799 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 3, 2015); or their opportunities to observe their religion under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons ACT (RLUIPA) or the Free Exercise Clause, for example, Greenhill v. Clarke, 7:16-cv-00068 (W. D. Va. Fe. 19, 2016).

Another line of constitutional cases is grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment, as courts have held that prisons must provide procedural protections to buffer against arbitrary placements in solitary confinement. In 2005, Justice Kennedy authored the unanimous decision of Wilkinson v. Austin which held that, because Ohio’s supermax imposed almost total sensory deprivations for indefinite periods of time and undermined access to parole, the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process meant that some procedural protections were required. Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209 (2005). A decade later, Justice Kennedy revisited the issue to underscore the harms of solitary confinement. While joining in the rejection of a habeas petition in Davis v. Ayala, Justice Kennedy explained that the petitioner, Hector Ayala, sentenced to death in 1989, had likely been held for decades “in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day . . . [and] allowed little or no opportunity for conversation or interaction with anyone.” Davis v. Ayala, 135 S. Ct. 2187, 2208 (2015) (Kennedy, J., concurring). To underscore his views of the injuries imposed, Justice Kennedy posited that sentencing judges warn defendants that, “during the many years you will serve in prison before your execution, the penal system has a solitary confinement regime that will bring you to the edge of madness, perhaps to madness itself.” Justice Kennedy then posited that the “judiciary may be required . . . to determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.”

After Wilkinson v. Austin, hundreds of lower court rulings addressed its application – which required showing that a particular kind of isolation was “atypical and imposed a substantial hardship.” Many rulings reflect that federal judges take for granted profound human isolation as “incident” to “normal” confinement, rather than “atypical.” One overview can be found in Punishment in Prison: Constituting the "Normal" and the "Atypical" in Solitary and Other Forms of Confinement, 115 Nw. U. L. Rev. 45 (2020) by Judith Resnik, Hirsa Amin, Sophie Angelis, Megan Hauptman, Laura Kokotailo, Aseem Mehta, Madeline Silva, Tor Tarantola, and Meredith Wheeler. For more materials, see our Research page.

Efforts to limit solitary’s use comes from 2016 rules on what by then was called “restrictive housing,” formulated by the American Correctional Association. In 2016, the American Correctional Association adopted new standards for accreditation that labeled confinement lasting more than 30 days “extended restrictive housing” and stated that prisoners in extended restrictive housing should be given access to certain services and programs. American Correctional Association, Restrictive Housing Performance Based Standards 3 (August 2016). The many policies promulgated since and efforts in specific states to limit or end solitary confinement can be found here.

Many other jurisdictions have statutes and court decisions on solitary confinement. One example comes from Canada where, in 2019, the Ontario Court of Appeal held that long-term solitary confinement was unconstitutional and approved a fifteen-day cap on placements in solitary. Ontario Court of Appeal rules more than 15 days in solitary ‘cruel and unusual’, CBC (March 28, 2019). In the same year, the British Columbia Court of Appeal also confirmed prolonged solitary confinement was unconstitutional. Wanyee Li, B.C. Court of Appeal confirms prolonged solitary confinement is unconstitutional in Canada, Toronto Star (June 24, 2019). The federal government and Ottawa sought to appeal and then decided not to. Patrick White, Canada abandons solitary confinement appeal to Supreme Court, The Globe and Mail (Apr. 21, 2020). The impact of reforms is contested. In 2022, the system that replaced solitary confinement was reported to also not allow meaningful human contact. Canadian inmates still face isolation amounting to torture, experts say, CBC (Apr. 7, 2022). For studies and information on the use of solitary confinement in other jurisdictions around the world, see the Mapping Solitary Confinement project at solitaryconfinement.org.

Transnational human rights law has also addressed solitary confinement. Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2006 concluded that, depending on the degree of isolation, the conditions, and the length, solitary confinement can constitute a violation of prohibitions on torture or inhuman and degrading treatment. Moreover, under European law, states must provide mechanisms for regular review of solitary confinement. European Court of Human Rights, Guide on the case-law of the European Convention on Human Rights, Prisoners’ Rights, (Aug. 31, 2022).

The Special Rapporteur for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in 2008 determined that the “weight of accumulated evidence to date points to the serious and adverse health effects of solitary confinement”— and hence that “prolonged solitary confinement” could constitute a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In 2011, the Special Rapporteur concluded that solitary confinement in excess of fifteen days should be prohibited.

In 2015, the U.N. adopted the Nelson Mandela Rules, which sought to prohibit what it termed to be “prolonged solitary confinement,” defined as lasting more than fifteen days. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) (Rules 43, 44) 13 (2015); United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Incorporating the Nelson Mandela Rules into National Prison Legislation: A Model Prison Act and Related Commentary (2022). These rules also called for limits on the use of solitary confinement for 15 days or less.