CityState : Reporter l by Ellen Liberman
Solitary Fight
For decades , science has shown that solitary confinement does not reduce violence among incarcerated people . Why is it still used in Rhode Island ’ s prisons ?
The Rhode Island State Prison opened in 1838 where the Providence Place mall stands today . It was originally designed to hold each prisoner separate and alone , except from sunup to sundown , when he was to work in silence . A troublesome inmate could expect to go hungry and sleep on the floor of his cell . When withholding food and furniture did not prove corrective enough , prison officials asked the legislature to add corporal punishment to the penalties .
Within a few years , the warden and prison physician found that the one deprivation least likely to produce a docile inmate , and most likely to create misbehavior , wasn ’ t a disciplinary tactic at all . It was the isolation at the core of incarceration . A prisoner was prohibited from communicating with anyone except the physician , prison staff or visiting clergy on a few limited topics . The scheme had its roots in a Quaker belief that enforced solitude allowed the wayward time to reflect on their misdeeds and become “ penitent .”
Instead , jailers found that depriving the inmates of meaningful social contact led to “ mental derangement ,” as the warden and prison physician wrote in their annual reports , and abolished the practice . In 1844 , Warden Thomas Cleveland submitted a passionate defense of the policy change to the General Assembly , blending case studies with psychological analysis . Withholding the mental
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION : EMILY RIETZEL AND GETTY IMAGES . stimulation of human interaction was like cutting off an alcoholic from “ ardent spirits ,” he wrote . The “ vagrant ” may be restored after surviving the delirium tremens , he wrote , but the consequences of long-term solitary confinement could be “ irreparable and he may be very much reduced in the scale of being ; without energy or capacity for action and unfit to be restored to society .”
Despite Cleveland ’ s firm rejection , the practice of confining offenders to their cells for long stretches with little to no interaction continued in Rhode Island and elsewhere , waxing and waning in popularity at the Adult Correctional Institutions ever since . Samantha Hill , a fifty-two-year-old trans woman , spent three months in protective custody in Rhode Island in 1998 awaiting trial on a federal bank robbery charge . Released from a Terre Haute , Indiana , prison seven years ago , she still remembers her time in the ACI .
“ I was new to this , so I was depressed , locked up in a cell twentythree hours . It started to wear on one ’ s psyche . You feel dehumanized , and I became very paranoid ,” she recalls .
Imprisoned for his role in a 2002 robbery and murder , Brandon Robinson spent eight months of his fifteen years in the ACI in the most restrictive conditions . He watched some of his neighbors develop paranoia , suicidal thoughts and auditory hallucinations .
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JUNE 2023 29