![]() His Oakland-based colleague, Terry Kupers - who teaches at the Wright Institute in Berkeley - says there's a consensus that solitary confinement harms mentally ill inmates, and that evidence suggests the environment at the Pelican Bay SHU impairs relatively stable inmates, as well. The toxicity to which Grassian refers derives from the space itself - from the fact that it has no windows, and affords little to no contact with other living things. ![]() The “toxicity of solitary confinement” is strong enough to induce psychosis in normal humans, he concludes in an article for the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy. Ex-prisoner Danny Murillo felt a swell of anxiety when visiting his father in the hospital because the long, white hallways reminded him of security housing.īut research suggests that security housing units produce harmful effects, which are often so potent that psychologists coined a new term to describe them: “security housing unit syndrome.” Former Harvard Medical School faculty member Stuart Grassian began using the term after evaluating 200 prisoners in various state and federal penitentiaries, and concluding that the ones locked in solitary exhibited “acute mental illness.” In some cases, they suffered pre-existing illnesses that were amplified after periods of prolonged isolation in others, he says, they'd previously been healthy. Steven Czifra, who spent nearly half his life in solitary confinement, says he now gets panic attacks when faced with big crowds or large rooms. Psychologists who study its effects say that sitting alone for prolonged periods can lead to insomnia, memory loss, and hallucinations.įormer prisoners who've tried to re-acclimate to the real world say they're often paralyzed by flashbacks. The list of demands varies, but there's a common thread: Isolation is a form of excessively cruel punishment, strikers argue, not because it involves any kind of physical abuse or deprivation rather, it's an ineffable form of torture, the kind that accrues gradually, over long periods of time. They've maintained a set of demands that range from the concrete (provide nutritious food, allow prisoners to make phone calls), to the abstract (“ensure that prisoners have regular, meaningful contact,” says one bullet point on a Prisoner Hunger Strike page). ![]() Most of the original strikers have given up, but a few hold-outs remain. As his pale, brooding face graced newspaper broadsides, Sell became an unsettling specter in a large and acrimonious debate.Īt that point, the Pelican Bay hunger strike had just entered its third week it's now into its seventh. But activists insist that Sell died of starvation, that he had joined 32,000 other prisoners to protest the harsh conditions in California's four security housing units, including the one in California State Prison, Corcoran, where he sat awaiting trial for murdering a cell mate. After conducting an autopsy, the Kings County coroner's office ruled that 32-year-old Sell had hanged himself. He'd been deemed too dangerous to interact with other inmates and had been confined in what's called a “security housing unit,” or SHU, when he was found dead. ![]() He'd earned a double life sentence for attempted first-degree murder. Design by Audrey Fukuman.īilly Sell was not, by any means, a sympathetic character. Photograph and direction by Mike Koozmin.
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