Photo by Susan Madden Lankford
An ACLU report released last month, “Worse Than Second Class: Solitary Confinement of Women in the United States,” states that women are affected by solitary confinement—which typically amounts to 22 to 23 hours alone in a cell the size of a large bathroom for weeks, months or years at a time—in distinct and often uniquely harmful ways. Women are put in the hole for small things. It can be for something stupid, like stealing a tomato from the kitchen or having two blankets instead of one.
Poverty is the dominant reason women commit crime, whether it’s sex work, welfare fraud or a drug offense. In many cases, these are crimes of survival. In 2004, more than 90% of imprisoned women reported annual incomes of less then $10,000 before imprisonment, and most hadn’t completed high school. When women do commit violent crimes, it’s typically to defend themselves against an abuser. As many as 90% of female prisoners are survivors of rape, domestic violence and/or other trauma.
Many are mentally ill, and even more are the primary caretakers of young children who depend on them. According to the ACLU, the number of children with a mother in prison has doubled in recent years.
Gail Smith of CLAIM, a Chicago organization that provides legal aid to prisoners on family law issues, says:
When a prisoner is in solitary, visits are more likely to take place through video conferencing, where the mother and child are in separate buildings. It is a terrible thing to have a child travel three or four hours to see their mom and not even be able to hug her.
If a female prisoner’s child is in foster care, as is the case 20% of the time, those women are required to demonstrate “reasonable progress” in order to prevent their child or children from being permanently taken away from them. Progress includes drug treatment, anger-management, parenting classes and survivor groups, all of which they are barred from while in solitary.
Terry Kupers, a California psychiatrist who focuses on the effects of prolonged isolation on prisoners, says:
There’s a causal development for many women prisoners between being separated from their children and depression and suicide. The general rule in psychology is that men get angry and women get depressed. This principle is taken to its extremity in solitary.
When a woman reports being raped by a guard, she is immediately placed in solitary confinement. Although this is ostensibly for her protection, it is in fact retaliation, designed to discourage women from reporting abuse in the first place. While in solitary, women are regularly supervised by male guards who can watch them showering, changing clothes and using the toilet—a loss of privacy and bodily autonomy that can often be re-traumatizing. Cut off from lawyers and family, and isolated from the general prison population, women in solitary are often at even greater risk of being sexual assaulted by staff with total impunity.
According to the ACLU, 75% of incarcerated women have mental illness. Sensory deprivation, the absence of human interaction and extreme idleness can lead to severe psychological debilitation, even in healthy, well-functioning adults—while people with mental illness more rapidly deteriorate.
Kupers adds:
People with a history of trauma and mental illness tend to have more ups and down emotionally. Eighty percent of incarcerated women have been sexually or physically abused, so the emotions that everyone has in solitary—anger, depression, anxiety, fear and paranoia—are going to be much, much stronger for them. In isolation, these emotions will magnify and just keep reverberating, with no one to talk to.
Placing women with mental illness in solitary confinement can amount to punishment for behavior beyond their control. Women with mental illness have a much harder time conforming their behavior to staff expectations. One women who gave an officer an exasperated look was thrown into solitary for “reckless eyeballing.”
Another woman was pregnant and struggling with mental illness. She had just gotten back from the hospital the night before and was completely exhausted. When the officer insisted she get up early for breakfast, she refused, so the officer shook her, insisting she get up. The women pushed back and ended up in solitary, where she had zero access to even basic prenatal care.
Widespread criticism of solitary confinement has led to congressional hearings in recent years and forced the federal Bureau of Prisons to embark on its first-ever internal review of the practice. New legislation was recently passed in New York and Colorado, limiting the use of isolation among some of the most vulnerable prison populations: juveniles and the mentally ill. Though critics largely see these changes as positive, many feel they don’t go nearly far enough.
Smith concludes:
In order to become more healthy, not just women, juveniles or the mentally ill but all prisoners need greater freedom to make new and better choices. Stuck in a cell by yourself 23 hours a day, this simply isn’t possible.
