By Noel Sims and Shira Minsk
This article contains references to physical violence and suicide, which some readers may find triggering.
A nineteen-year-old Michael Braham was dressed in only his boxers, a t-shirt, and socks when guards came to his cell after breakfast and took him to the solitary confinement unit of Corrigan Correctional Institution in Uncasville, CT.
“You get handcuffed, you get brought down to wherever the segregation unit is, and then you’re taken to a strip search…. And then they tell you ‘there’s two squares on the floor, stand on those squares,’ and they say ‘bend at the waist and open your buttocks,’ so they see inside,” Braham said.
When the guards told Braham to take off his clothes, he resisted. “‘Hell no, fuck you,’ that’s what I told them,” he described. The guards did not back down, and neither did Braham. On the senior guard’s orders, “They jumped on me and cut my clothes off,” Braham said. Braham was left completely naked, hands cuffed behind his back with nothing in his cell but a dirty mattress. Aside from this instance, Braham was put into solitary confinement 15 times throughout his 25-year prison sentence. His longest stint lasted more than seven months.
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Barbara Fair, who was born and raised in Connecticut, has advocated for prison reform across the U.S. since her brother was imprisoned when she was a teenager. But until her own son was sent to Northern Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s supermax prison, she was unaware that the disturbing practice of long-term solitary confinement that she had witnessed elsewhere was occuring in her own state.
In 1997, Fair’s sixteen-year-old son was being held in solitary confinement in Northern while awaiting trial — though he had not been convicted of any crimes yet. Prison guards can place inmates in solitary confinement for disciplinary infractions or because they are deemed too dangerous to reside in the general prison population — the definition of “dangerous” left largely to the discretion of each guard. Fair’s son’s sole transgression was an altercation with a guard at the youth correctional facility where he was previously held.
Fair learned about her son’s life in Northern from letters he sent her describing physical, physiological, and emotional abuse. She began to reach out to legislators, commissioners, and “just anybody who could please get [her] son out of there.” After encountering countless dead ends, Fair realized that the only way to help her son was to advocate for systemic change.
According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, which are known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, Fair’s son’s six-month long stint in Northern was a human rights violation. The rules classify solitary confinement lasting longer than 15 consecutive days as torture. For pregnant inmates, minors, and inmates with preexisting mental illness or physical disabilities, the Mandela Rules prohibit the practice altogether. But across U.S. prisons, violations of the Mandela Rules are commonplace. On November 1, 2020, Northern Correctional Institution, where Fair’s son was kept in solitary confinement, held 50 inmates in administrative segregation, all of whom had been in solitary for more than the 15 day maximum. The longest stay approached four years.
Fair and her organization, Stop Solitary Connecticut, won the bipartisan passage of the PROTECT Act, 24 years after her son’s release from Northern. The legislation would have prohibited isolated confinement, defined as sixteen or more hours locked in a cell, except in certain emergency response scenarios. After the bill passed through the Connecticut General Assembly in June 2021, Fair followed Governor Ned Lamont out to his car, where Lamont told her he intended to sign the bill. “We thought our work was done,” Fair said. “I went on vacation.”
But three weeks later, under pressure from the union representing corrections officers, Lamont vetoed the bill. Like the union, Lamont cited concerns for the “safety of incarcerated persons and correction employees” as the motivation for his veto. In its place, he issued an executive order, which can easily be overturned at a later date, with weaker restrictions against the use of solitary confinement.
Lamont and other officials have celebrated the executive order, as well as the closure of Northern Correctional Institution in June 2021, as progressive steps toward a more humane criminal justice system, but Fair rejected these actions as any kind of victory. “They just shut down Northern and move the abuse to other prisons,” she said. As for the executive order, Fair said, “It was a waste of paper. It was useless.”
“I always worried about taking care of my son,” Fair added. “But what about all those other sons that are in there that nobody’s even checking on? That’s how this work became my life.”
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“They take you as if you’re being arrested inside the prison,” Braham said. In many ways, entering solitary confinement is like entering a prison within a prison. Inmates are handcuffed when they are brought into the unit, and they undergo a trial to determine if they are guilty of the alleged infraction. Once in solitary confinement, inmates are hidden away in isolated corners of the prisons, which are often built intentionally out of the public eye.
“These places are sometimes underground, or behind five doors in the innermost part of the prison. So, they’re literally not even visible to people working or living in the prison,” explained Keramet Reiter, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine. The consequences of this opacity are severe. “We have no idea what happens to people there.”
Nationwide, the invisibility of solitary confinement is not just physical. Woefully inconsistent data collection also clouds our picture of life in solitary. Discrepancies in each state’s classification of solitary confinement — referred to in different circumstances as restrictive housing units, security housing units, and even administrative segregation — make it difficult for researchers to observe nationwide trends. Working with irregular, often-incomplete data, researchers believe that the numbers they are working with grossly underestimate the actual inmate population in solitary confinement.
While solitary confinement remains largely invisible to researchers, citizens, and even those living and working within the prison system, the practice heightens many pressing social issues. “Lots of social problems that we have, like lack of health care, or lack of education, racism, or mental health care, are all magnified in our prisons,” said Reiter, “and I think of solitary confinement as magnifying those problems even further.”
Racism is one of the social issues most severely amplified by solitary confinement. Black men make up 5.95% of the general population in Connecticut, but 42.2% of the total male custodial population in the state. For many Americans, this statistic may be jarring but not surprising. Racial disparities in the criminal justice system have become a focal point of political discourse in the past decade, though the scholarship on this issue has existed since the turn of the 20th century. Reiter explained that racism is “just endemic to the prison system. Because of slavery, we have a particular kind of race relation that played out in our criminal justice system.”
What remains obscure is the exaggeration of these disparities in the prison within the prison: solitary confinement. Black men make up 53.6% of the inmates in restrictive housing in Connecticut. A Yale Law School survey found that racial disparities among inmates in solitary confinement exist nationwide.
“When we look at the process by which people are assigned to solitary confinement, it’s hard to identify the point at which there’s racism. But when you just take snapshots, and you look at those in solitary confinement versus those in the general prison population, marginalized groups are grossly over-represented in solitary confinement,” said Reiter. “The undertone of racism is there at every step, because a prison system is built on controlling groups of people who are seen as less human.”
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While Fair and her organization, Stop Solitary Confinement, were fighting to change Connecticut’s system from the outside, Tracie Bernardi was locked in a restrictive housing unit inside Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution, suffering the consequences of abusive and often arbitrary prison practices. The prison required that Bernardi serve two years in solitary confinement without receiving a disciplinary ticket for infractions in order to return to the general prison population. But each time she received a ticket while in solitary, her two-year clock restarted. These “infractions” did not have to be violent; they could be absolutely arbitrary. On one occasion, Bernardi was sentenced to two more years for giving another inmate a teabag — inmates were not supposed to share. She ultimately served seven consecutive years in solitary confinement.
When she first arrived in solitary, Bernardi and other inmates in her unit had to shower with their hands cuffed in front of them. Their shower had no door, and without the handcuffs, guards claimed they could not ensure that the inmates would not run away. Bernardi often had to finish washing up in the sink in her cell because she could not adequately clean her body with chained hands. A year into Bernardi’s time in solitary, the prison finally installed a door for the shower so that the inmates could wash themselves with their hands free.
Like Bernardi, Braham was forced to shower with his hands cuffed and feet shackled during his first week of solitary confinement at age nineteen. Other inmates had to explain how he could remove his underwear through his shackles.
Bernardi and Braham faced many other dehumanizing practices while in solitary, such as staying in dirty cells in which previous inmates had sometimes smeared blood or feces, spending their daily hour of recreation time pacing back and forth in a cage (“like a dog,” said Braham), using only a one-inch toothbrush, and eating poorly cooked meals often tampered with by guards. Both Bernardi and Braham said that if a guard with whom they had a recent conflict served their food, they would refuse to eat it. “That’s just not a chance you take,” said Braham.
Though many of the abuses that Braham and Bernardi suffered resulted from concrete Connecticut Department of Correction (DOC) policy, much of their day-to-day treatment, like the food they were served, hinged on which guards they interacted with on a given day. Particular guards were known to be the cruelest , said Bernardi, but “other guards condone it by not doing anything.”
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In the 1980s, when solitary confinement was first developing into the widespread practice that it is in American prisons today, Department of Correction officials across the nation marketed it as something that would only be used for inmates that posed serious threats to prison security — “the worst of the worst,” according to David Pyrooz, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder and long-time researcher of solitary confinement. “A lot of people could at least get on board,” said Pyrooz, “or at least understand that somebody could be placed in solitary confinement, if they’re constantly spitting on officers, assaulting other prisoners, gassing other prisoners, throwing feces and urine on them.”
But as time went on, the range of infractions that qualified an inmate as “the worst of the worst” became increasingly broad. Suddenly, guards were putting inmates in solitary confinement simply for being insubordinate. “It wasn’t only violent people, but people who just didn’t obey the rules,” explained Pyrooz.
Robert Gillis, who now works with Fair at Stop Solitary Connecticut, noticed the overuse of solitary confinement in Connecticut prisons during his time as a warden with the Connecticut Department of Correction. “The usual mantra is, ‘Our lives are in jeopardy if we don’t have the ability to lock people up whenever we feel it’s necessary.’” he said. “Well, it’s necessary far less frequently than it’s utilized.”
Gillis said that solitary confinement might be justifiably used when inmates were very out of control, when multiple inmates were fighting, or when there was an escalation of physical violence. “Individual perpetrators in that situation have to be put into secure status, but certainly not indefinitely, and certainly not for 24 hours,” he said. Gillis explained that in his experience, in order to avoid overusing solitary confinement, the correctional officers have to be confident that they could control a situation without resorting to “extreme measures.”
“Did it serve a purpose? Yes, it did serve a purpose,” Gillis said. “Was it a good purpose? Not really. Were there other ways to deal with it? Always.”
Like Gillis, Pyrooz feels that solitary confinement is used too often, though he also believes that the practice plays an integral role in prison security under certain circumstances. Pyrooz believes in a rehabilitative model of prisons — one that releases inmates back into society as healthy, self-sufficient individuals — and acknowledges that solitary confinement has severe negative psychological effects. He argued, though, that the isolation of an inmate can be essential to prison safety when there is “a rabble-rouser or somebody who’s up to trouble, who can completely derail rehabilitative efforts in the rest of the units.” Pyrooz noted that solitary confinement is particularly useful for managing the behavior of prison gang members, of which there are over 200,000 in United States prisons.
But any benefits of solitary confinement come at a high cost. Inmates like Braham, Bernardi, and Fair’s son, who Connecticut keeps in solitary confinement for extended periods, pay this price — sometimes with their lives.
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Tracie Bernardi does not remember exactly when she tried to hang herself at York Correctional Institution. It was sometime in the winter of her fifth year in solitary confinement. What she does remember is the sound of another inmate screaming after peering into her cell, and a guard rushing in and pushing his knee up between her legs to hold her weight so that he could loosen the restraint around her neck.
“When I hung myself it had started to go black and I was changing my mind but I really couldn’t do anything about it on my own because I already kicked the chair.”
Bernardi spent the next six months in solitary confinement in York’s mental health unit before being transferred back to the regular unit to complete her time in solitary. But her time in the mental health unit was not helpful or rehabilitative. “Even when I was in mental health solitary, I never thought I would make it out of prison alive. Never. And I thought I was gonna die at my own hands,” she said.
Bernardi recalled that one day, “It got so bad that I just started crying and crying and I sat under my counter in my room…and I just screamed at the top of my lungs for like, an hour because I just had no control over anything. And there was nothing I could do.” Leading up to her suicide attempt, Bernardi frequently self-harmed by cutting her arms. She contemplated standing on the counter in her cell “and just free falling backwards and smashing my head open.”
There is an expansive body of evidence that indicates that solitary confinement causes severe, long-term psychological damage. A study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that in the first year of release, the risk of death for inmates who experienced solitary confinement during their incarceration is 24% higher than that of the general population. Inmates’ chances of dying by suicide are 78% higher.
Another study from the University of California, Irvine, showed disproportionately high rates of serious mental illness — including depression, anxiety, and self-harming behavior — among inmates in solitary confinement compared to the general prison population.
Reiter, the University of California, Irvine law professor, was the principal investigator on the study. She explained that “it’s incredibly common for people who’ve experienced solitary to talk about a constellation of symptoms that some people describe as SHU symptoms.” SHU, which stands for Security Housing Unit, is one of the many names used to refer to solitary confinement. According to Reiter, SHU symptoms include anxiety attacks, sleep disruption, and hallucination.
Those in solitary confinement “might go months or years at a time without having normal face-to-face interactions with people so the only other people they see are officers who are cuffing their hands behind their backs. You’re not really looking eye to eye with anyone ever,” Reiter explained.
As her son’s time in solitary wore on, Fair noticed many of the symptoms that Reiter describes appearing in him. “I could see from the letters he was writing that he was starting to lose a grip on reality…. He would start saying things that just didn’t make sense,” she said. After one particular visit to Northern, Fair became increasingly concerned that her son was no longer himself. “He’s in front of me, but he’s not in front of me,” she remembered thinking.
While time spent in solitary confinement can cause or exacerbate mental illness in inmates, those with pre-existing mental illness are more likely to end up in solitary confinement in the first place. The Yale Law School study revealed that in 33 states, individuals with serious mental illness make up 6.1% of the general male prison population, but these individuals make up 7.9% of males in restrictive housing.
Gillis said that throughout his 36-years with the Department of Correction he saw many inmates come into prison, and solitary confinement specifically, with pre-existing mental health issues, ranging from depression and anxiety to conditions bordering on schizophrenia. Solitary confinement exacerbated those inmates’ pre-existing mental illnesses. “Even a person who is of relatively sound mind, when locked up with virtually complete sensory deprivation, with banging from people in adjacent cells, contact with staff which is very often verbally abusive, and sometimes physically abusive…whatever was there before definitely gets worse,” he explained.
The psychological damage wrought by time spent in solitary confinement does not disappear when prisoners are released. Bernardi’s transition back to the general prison population from solitary confinement was difficult, and though she was released from prison in 2015, she still faces serious issues with anxiety. “I like to be away from people and when I go to do stuff, I’m very nervous and very uncomfortable,” she said. Bernardi directly attributes her anxiety to her seven years in solitary.
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Activists, psychologists, and former inmates alike concur that solitary confinement is an inhumane practice. But agreeing on the depravity of solitary confinement is much easier than coming to a consensus on a solution to mitigate its harms.
The most popular reforms include the establishment of oversight committees to enforce the Mandela Rules and rehabilitation programs to help inmates re-enter the general prison population and eventually society outside prisons.
In Oregon, the Department of Corrections implemented the “Step Up Program” to improve the living conditions of those in solitary confinement at the beginning of 2020. The program gave individuals in solitary confinement more time out of their cells, more opportunities for social interaction, and increased opportunities for rehabilitative treatment programs, including health educational programming and recreational activities such as art classes. A study done on the program found encouraging results, and some prisoners saw their new living conditions as fairer and less harmful. However, because of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Step Up Program was never fully implemented as intended, leaving researchers with unanswered questions about the program and its effects both on prisoners and on institutional safety and security.
Pyrooz, who worked on the study, explained that these questions have crucial implications for policy making. If prisoners who participated in Oregon’s Step Up behaved similarly to prisoners who did not participate, prison officials could accordingly keep inmates in less restrictive conditions than traditional administrative segregation.
Fair herself was a former advocate for gradual reforms that improved the living conditions of individuals in solitary confinement. Increasingly, though, she has become disillusioned by moderate change after witnessing the repeated failure of reform projects.
In 2017, a reform bill that Fair pushed was watered down until its only significant provision was prohibiting locking inmates under 18 years old in solitary confinement. In 2021, what was supposed to be a set of sweeping changes under the PROTECT Act amounted to nothing more than a few vague shifts in policy by executive order that left plenty of room for DOC officials to continue the use of solitary confinement. Now, Fair’s focus is on abolishing the practice of solitary confinement altogether.
“Reform just changes a little thing here, a little thing there,” said Fair, “and then we’re supposed to believe that that’s actually going to bring change when the change that we need is at the root of the system.”
To Fair, the change needed in solitary confinement is inextricable from the foundations of the prison system itself. “If we look at the roots of the systems of prisons, they are deeply tied to slavery,” she said, calling incarceration “slavery by another name.” She cited the racialized enforcement of the late twentieth century’s War on Drugs as fuel for the disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color.
UC Irvine’s Reiter acknowledged that abolishing solitary confinement feels like an unreachable dream. “I don’t think we can cut solitary confinement out of the prison system like you can kind of cancer out of the body and think that it won’t come back…. If we really want to think about getting rid of it, I think we have to think much more broadly about reconceptualizing the criminal justice system we have,” she explained.
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On June, 23, 2021, 25 years to the day after he first entered the Connecticut prison system, Braham was released. Since then, Braham has worked as a paralegal for a local civil rights attorney in New Haven. He enrolled in the Access to Law School Program at Yale to help prepare him for law school applications and is currently studying for the LSAT. As Braham transitions back to life outside the prison walls, he is advocating for those who are still inside. He is working with the Full Citizens Coalition on winning voting rights for incarcerated individuals in Connecticut.
Since the end of her sentence in 2015, Bernardi has also dedicated herself to activism. She co-founded Once Incarcerated, a nonprofit organization for incarcerated individuals and their families; works as an ACLU Smart Justice leader; and has testified at the Connecticut State Capitol about her experiences in solitary confinement.
After years of abuse, isolation, and invisibility, Braham and Bernardi’s stories have become ones of hope and empowerment. But stories like theirs cannot make up for the thousands of other stories — so often untold — of those released from prison after extended stays in solitary confinement who do not find avenues for recovery.
“I have a huge support system,” Braham said. “I’ve seen the same obstacles that other people see…. And I’m saying to myself, if I’ve got a strong support system, and I’m being hobbled by something like this, how much worse off is the person who doesn’t have that support system? Are they doomed to fail?”
Note: A previous version of this article included the wrong name for Barbara Fair’s son. The article has been updated to remove the incorrect name, and reflect that Fair’s son would prefer to remain anonymous.