March 21, 2017 • 47 mins
In our continuing exploration of crime and punishment, we take a look at the practice of solitary confinement. To be sure, it has its place in prisons, sometimes for protection of the inmates themselves. However, leaving people in solitary for weeks, months and even years is another thing. We explore this cruel and unusual punishment in today's episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is Stuff you
should know. Crime and Punishment Party eight Yeah, yeah, and
(01:10):
a lot of stuff on this And I thought we've
got more coming. I kept keep saying we're done, but
we're not done. Because while we touched on solitary confinement,
in Our Prisons episode, which was a great one, was it.
Have you gone back and listen recently. You're just making
assumption now, I just remember it being a good one.
It stands out. It's one of our good ones. Uh,
(01:32):
this is um, you know, a little more robust. Look,
it's solitary confinement and the ins and outs mostly outs,
don't you think? Yes? And not just me. There's like
a whole growing body of people who are kind of
(01:52):
screaming their heads off. I guess, yeah, saying like, hey,
put a person in a tiny room with no interaction
or stimulation twenty three hours a day. Not good for
you as a human right, And a lot of people
are going so far as to say this, this constitutes
cruel and in human punishment. Yeah, it's kind of like
zukosis for humans. We talked about that in Our Zoo's episode. Yeah, um,
(02:16):
you know, yeah, where the animal goes insane. Yeah. What
it's not is Steve McQueen in The Great Escape throwing
the baseball against the wall. Let's probably do that for
like a half hour. No, they wouldn't give you a baseball.
Oh that's true. You know, there's nothing funny you're cute
about it right, um, all right, shall we Yeah, that's
(02:41):
so solitary. It is a huge controversial thing right now
because some a lot of proponents say it's extremely necessary
and that this is just the way that you're supposed
to punish people, or that it's just needed even without
punishment or um. Other people say, no, this is cool
(03:01):
and in human, like we said, regardless of how you
slice it is actually an American product, it's an American export.
It's being used all over the world right now. Yeah,
And depending on where you are and what prison you're in,
they might call it something else. They have a lot
of I mean, in this article the house Stuff Works article,
they you know, call it like lockdown, restrictive housing, segregation, isolation.
(03:25):
But I saw a lot more uh creative names that
prisons use that you know, try to shine it up
a bit as something other than what it is. Right,
But in what it is, no matter what you call
it is, it's confining a prisoner to a relatively small
cell um I saw usually eight by ten or less.
(03:47):
And I also saw that frequently compared to a horse stable,
in which comparison the um the prison cell actually comes
out the smaller of the two and you confine that
and this is the key you can find that person
to that small selfer between twenty three and twenty four
hours a day every day. Yeah, well I think twenty
(04:10):
They like some people never leave. It depends on the day.
So uh, in some cases you'll be confined like that
for twenty three hours a day and then one hour
a day you get out to exercise and um shower.
But maybe that's just on week days. So a weekend
you would be in there for forty eight straight hours
(04:33):
or longer. If the guard doesn't like you or is
in a bad mood, they might just not let you
out that day, right, And we don't want to paint
corrections officers, as you know, the movies do a good
enough job of demonizing them. Yeah, And if you look
into the some of the people who are being held
(04:54):
in solitary, some of the people who started solitary or
have stayed in their longest, you kind of understand why
someone would want to keep them as far away from
people as possible, you know. So, like it's it's a
it's a it's a complex issue. It's not cut and dried.
There's not an obvious villain in this story, and an
obvious victim in this story. Yeah, so, like I was saying, Um,
(05:15):
we don't want to demonize them because it's happened enough
in media and certainly films. Tom Hanks aside, I guess
in The Green Mile, he just he can't help but
be delightful. Uh, he played a well. He was actually
kind of I was about to say Road to Perdition.
He was the good guy. He was an anti hero though, Yeah,
(05:35):
a bit of an anti hero. But uh, anyway, we're
not gonna do that. But that does still happen, you know. There.
That's why prison reform is still a thing, because there's
still is a lot of abuse that happens in certain
prisons and among certain prison guards and uh, correctional officers.
So uh, it's certainly not something that's been solved. Uh.
(05:56):
I just like to see away a little bit because
I know that we have prison guards that listen to
our show, and Chuck, we we should say the whole
point of solitary is to limit human contact as much
as possible. Yeah, so even though you are maybe interacting
with a guard here there, it's when they slide your
meal in three times a day, and that's it. You
(06:18):
don't see people. You um, you exercise alone. Everything you're
doing is alone. And that's the point. That's why they
call it solitary confinement. It is uh. So there's a
couple of types of segregation that can happen. One's called
disciplinary segregation. That is uh pretty obvious you have done
(06:38):
something that has run a foul of the prison rules um,
which can range from legitimate things like you know, you
start a fight, or you attacked another inmate or you
know what, caught with an extra honey bun maybe so,
or you you stole something um too a little more
petty things and that's where that's where materia gets real hinky,
(07:01):
Like maybe you talk back to a guard and they
didn't like hearing that, so they're like, all right, you
got to the hole for thirty days, right, Or maybe
somebody um snitched on you and you were framed clearing
clearing simple, right. So that's disciplinary segregation. There's also administrative segregation,
and this is UM. You might be put in there
(07:21):
if let's say you're a sex offender who notoriously have
a rough time in prison, or you're a gang member
who has started some trouble and you know Basically they're
trying to protect uh supposedly trying to protect the prisoner
from harm. Yeah, by isolating them from the population. Yeah,
(07:42):
but whether they whether they want to stay in the
regular population or not, that decisions made for them, right,
And that's just one type of administrative Um. You can
also be put in if the regular cells are full
and they're just full up, so sorry, you gotta go
to solitary. Uh, with overcrowding, that's obviously a big deal. Um,
(08:03):
pre trial you can go in if you're not even
convicted of a crime yet, this might be put in solitary.
There should be a constitutional amendment that prevents that. Yeah,
I read the story. Actually, I heard it on NPR
this weekend, which is what made me think of this thing. Uh.
There's a documentary on Spike TV called the Calif Browder Story.
(08:23):
Is that the kid who stole the backpack? Yeah? Did
you hear that? No, I just knew about it while
it was going on. Yeah, this this guy, Calif Browder um,
when he was I think he was sixteen at the time, UM,
stole a backpack from a party. He and his buddy
get uh get I don't. I don't know if they're
in a car, got pulled over, but they get arrested.
(08:45):
They let the one guy go, but Calif Browder had
a prior charge, so they kept him for more than
three years in uh the Rikers Island Jail complex, and
a lot of that was in solitary confinement, confinement, and
this before like ultimately the charges were dropped. He wasn't
even convicted of a crime, and he was in solitary
for three years. He finally gets out. He committed suicide
(09:08):
lessening year after. And it's just one of the geez
one of the more egregious and sad examples of just
how broken the system can be here in the United States.
The the another UM way that it's being used that's
just as egregious as pre trial UM in my opinion,
is to house the mentally ill right after after the eighties,
(09:34):
when Reagan closed down the massive institutions that had become
like huge places of abuse of the mentally ill in
favor of um more community servicing of mental health, but
then didn't fund the communities, so that the mentally ill
just ended up on the street. Right prison became the
(09:57):
new institutions for housing mentally ill people well apparently a
favorite place to actually house the mentally ill in prison
is in solitary confinement. And as we'll see, UM, ostensibly
just being put in solitary confinement if you have a
completely healthy mind is really really bad for your mental state.
(10:19):
If you're already mentally ill or predisposed of mental illness,
it can be a death sentence for you. Yeah, and
uh in the United States, UM, they don't have exact
numbers because uh, it's just you know, states vary and
what they consider confinement solitary confinement. UM. Not a lot
of prisons want to participate in studies. There's no reporting,
(10:42):
not very much, you know. UM, but I have the impression, Chuck,
that you could be like a congress person saying like
I want to tour your solitary wing and you would
get turned out. There's like that level of um self
administration by the Bureau of Corrections inside prisons. Yeah. So
the number very but UM basically most people say up
(11:03):
to a hundred thousand inmates in the United States, And again,
not all of these are in prison. Some of them
are in jail, some of them or in uh uh
immigrant temporary immigrant housing uh are kept in isolation. And Um,
there isn't a You don't go before a court to
get put in the whole you you know, a prison
(11:25):
official will dictate this. There is no recourse for a prisoner.
They call the shots. There's no oversight, can be indefinite.
You can't call your attorney and say, hey, I'm in
solitary and I didn't do anything. All that is talk back.
I've been in here for six months because the guard
has a problem with me. Um, there's nothing that can
be done, basically no. So that makes it an extra
judicial punishment with no oversight from judges or juries, which
(11:52):
is that's that's not good. And it's really widespread, not
just in the United States but around the world. Now, yeah,
well let's take a break and we'll come back and
talk a little bit about how this all got started.
Right after this, so Chuck I said earlier that this
(12:37):
is an American invention, right, It's actually an American Quaker invention.
The Friends Society of Friends came up with the idea
of solitary confinement first, and I feel like we talked
about this in the Prison episode two. The whole idea
was that, Um, at the time, you know you might
be put to to labor or work or um just
(12:59):
left to hang around your fellow inmates in jail. And
the idea behind solitary originally that the Quakers came up
with was that you should be given time to reflect
on your punishment and quiet solitude, and the hope was
that eventually you would become penitent and be redeemed. And
that's where the word penitentiary came from to describe prisons.
(13:21):
That's right. This is the late eighteenth century when they
came up with it at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia,
which sounds lovely. It does sound kind of like a
nice place to be. I bet it wasn't. Uh. Flash
forward a bit to the kind of early third of
the eighteen hundreds and eighteen twenty nine Eastern State Penitentiary
in Pennsylvania. They said, you know what, we're gonna try
(13:44):
experimenting with how we deal with prisoners, and we're gonna
try this thing called lockdown. Uh. They found that it
didn't work very well. These inmates were socially dysfunctional, a
lot of them killed themselves, and so in eighteen twenty
nine they abandoned it and said, this is not a
good idea Yeah, within the first forty years of it
(14:04):
being invented, they're like, no, we shouldn't be doing this
to people. And they went in favor of the Auburn
State Prison and Upstate New York's method of putting people
the hard labor that became the the um the what
you what you did when you got sent to prison,
rather than put into solitary, and they kept solitary around
like you didn't go away entirely, Like basically every prison
(14:27):
had a hole. You get thrown in the hole, but
you get thrown in the hole for like days or
weeks or something like that to punish you for something
you did in the prison. Yeah, and they still say,
like experts still say it can be a useful tool
in prison if you do put someone in there for
three to five days or I think the u N
says no more than two weeks, fifteen days, I think
(14:48):
is what they came up with. Yeah, So you know,
the point is is not to say like, well, I mean,
I'm sure there are tons of people that say you
shouldn't do it at all, but experts say that it
can be a deterrent for you know, poor behavior or
whatever in prison. But people being in there for months
and years is the issue at hand. So it was
used sparingly, but it was still around throughout the most
(15:10):
of the twentieth century. Alcatraz famously had D Block, which
was like a solitary block. Um. But then on October
twenty everything changed in the current incarnation of the use
of solitary confinement was born on that day at Marian Prison,
Marian Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois. So there were two
(15:34):
different incidents where prison guards were killed that day. Yes,
it's not two separate things, right, yeah, And um, the
the warden put the prison on lockdown and just kept
it there. And what the warden basically invented in in
retaliation for these two murders on this day was what's
(15:54):
now known as a super max prison. It's where all
of the prisoners are kept ultimately in isolation for twenty
three to twenty four hours a day, uh, throughout the prison.
And it's like a prison within a prison. Each inmate
is in their own individual prison within the larger prison,
and that's called super max prison. Yeah, and we talked
(16:16):
about those a lot in the Prisons episode. These became
uh uh not the new standard because you know, not
all prisons of super max. But they became more widespread
for sure through the nineties, um partially because of Bill
Clinton in he signed the very famous crime Bill, which,
(16:36):
among other things and it was famously known as the
three strikes Bill. Well, yeah, that's what created the exploding
prison population in large part. Yeah. And Clinton he still
defends this as um going a long way to alleviate crime. Uh,
even like during this most recent election he was being
called out for it and and saying like this was,
(16:59):
you know, a good thing, and um, the detractors still say, no,
this is what started in a big, big way incarceration
as as a business model in this country. Yeah. And
apparently the US now has twent of the global prison
population but only five percent of the global population as
(17:21):
a whole. Yeah, that's really disproportionate. And apparently we're second
at least on paper to the Seychelles um for the
percentage of people in prison. Every seven hundred sixteen of
every hundred thousand people in the US is in prison,
and in the Seychells it's seven of every hundred thousand.
(17:44):
But stay shells as a population of so that kind
of excuse it. And they think that the largest prison
state really is um North Korea that it has a
larger port proportion of its population in prison the US.
So technically the U s would be number three, but
we would just be trailing North Korea. It's not something
(18:06):
you want to trail. It's not not a country that
you want to be super close to as far as
like prison population percentages. No. Um. So, like we said before,
there are even experts that say that solitary confinement can
have a place in prison as a deterrent for bad behavior. UM.
(18:26):
And like I mentioned earlier, two separate things here. Bad
behavior is one, but you know, mentally ill, we just
don't have enough space. Um. You know all these other
reasons of the truly abhorrent ones. UM. But like I said,
deterrent is a big one. UM. There there is a
lot of legitimacy to protecting UM prisoners from fellow prisoners.
(18:50):
They're at high risk for being injured or killed, that's
legit obviously. If they're a danger, you know, have attacked
guards or other inmates, then uh a need for separation,
like you can make a case you know there for sure, Um,
if they're prone to escape, yeah, maybe they need their
(19:10):
own little room. I mean, that's that's one of the
big ones that for for proponents of super max prisons
that like this is it's a prison within a prison,
and they have to get out of that first prison
and then they're still in the other prison. It just
just makes it much more difficult to get out. Yeah,
I mean, you escape and you go on and commit
more crimes, murder someone while are on the lamb Uh.
(19:31):
You can definitely make an argument that keeping people like that, um,
these repeat offenders or repeat escape e offenders in solitary.
So those are some of the arguments for Yeah. And
then I I don't know if you said it already,
but that having that extra way to punish someone who's
already in prison is another reason proponents say you need
(19:54):
to have this as a tool to kind of maintain order,
like if you legitimately run a foul of rules or yeah,
like yeah, exactly, because I mean, if you if you
kill another inmates, sensibly you're going to go through trial again,
but the you know that you could be executed for
for that, and that would be different than just being
(20:17):
in prison. But if you weren't, then that's basically like, oh,
you're in prison for life. Already, Well we're gonna add
another life sentence onto that, you know, Like, there's only
so much you can do to someone who's in prison
short of executing them. Uh, And the solid solitary confinement,
proponents say provides that extra layer, right. And the reason
(20:40):
it provides that extra deterrent though, is because of the
impact it has been shown to have on the mind
of inmates. And there's a few problems with this. Before
we get into it, we should say there's they're very
little studies. And one of the reasons why there there
are so few studies is because there's so little access
(21:02):
to prisoners in solitary confinement by researchers. It's just not allowed.
They're just kept out. Yeah. I saw a lot of
these studies were longitudinal studies about isolation of the elderly
and like the effect it can have on them. Well,
there's a big worry I've seen that that's like the
next health crisis is going to be loneliness and disconnectedness. Um.
(21:25):
But yeah, that's that's where they've gotten a lot of
the data because the the prisoners are unavailable for study
there in solitary and in that same vein possibly disingenuously. Um.
The ones that have been able to be interviewed say
they've gotten out of prison and now they're available to
be interviewed. Um. The proponents of um SO of solitary
(21:51):
confinement say that the prisoners are just they're just telling
researchers what they think they want to hear, or they're
really playing up their story or whatever. But what they
found is that there there seems to be a basis
for the idea that there are demonstrably negative impacts on
mental health that are possibly permanent and irreversible that comes
(22:15):
from staying in solitary confinement for prolonged times. Yeah, I
mean there have been some studies. There was one on
the Pelican Bay Prison in California, and it said, Uh,
people in solitary for long periods, uh, suffer from depression, anxiety, apathy, hallucinations,
panic attacks, paranoia. Um, this is a big one. Hypersensitivity
(22:36):
external stimuli basically sound and light. Right. Uh. Sometimes they're
kept in the dark. Sometimes the light never goes off,
so they you know, have no sense of you know,
no circadian rhythm of day or night, which makes sleep
extraordinarily difficult to Apparently, prisoners who are in solitary will
(22:58):
basically stay in bed all day and then they don't
sleep much at night. But they're not really getting good
sleep during the day either, So it's not like the
circadian rhythm has flip flopped. It's been spread out over
the day rather than um so which prevents it from
getting actually real rest because they're constantly at rest. Uh.
(23:20):
What else difficulties UM thinking, concentration, memory, UM, they become
angry and violent, they could suffer from dizziness, UM, heart palpitations, perspiration.
Basically like we're saying, zukosis, Like you're trapped in this
little box and it's not like, well, you can just
read all day and educate yourself or something, or paint well.
(23:42):
And in cases where they are, yes, because a lot
of times they're not given those things. But most time
you're you're not allowed any form of stimulation or entertainment.
So in in plenty of cases you are, like, you're
still allowed to say books or something like that. But
apparently one of the things you run into very quickly
in solitary is you lose your taste for reading, even
(24:03):
though that's all you have to do, because you can't
remember what you read a few pages previously, so you're
you're having so many problems with your memory that you're
not able to retain enough of what you're reading to
make a book worthwhile. So you just stopped reading after
a while. Wow. Uh so where could this lead in
(24:26):
a physical sense? Um? They have done studies and they
show that if you're in solitary for extended periods, you
have a higher rate of self mutilation and suicide. Um.
They did one five year study from two thousand four
in California, I think, in their whole prison system, and
almost fifty of all inmate suicides were committed by those
(24:50):
in isolation. And see, that's a tough thing for someone
who who uh doesn't believe that that that isolation is
a real problem. That's a that's a that's a tough
one for them to just get rid of. Because the
other stuff, you can say, well, that's all self reporting
by a prisoner in solitary, So maybe they're just kind
(25:10):
of making it up or playing it up if they're
mutilating themselves. One guy mutilated his own genitalia, another person
blinded himself. Um, and then you have all of these
um completed or attempted suicides. Uh. Those are like hard
numbers that you just can't ignore that. You would think
(25:31):
people otherwise wouldn't do that if they weren't in solitary
or else the solitary population wouldn't represent such a high
proportion of suicides and attempted suicides in the prison, you know. Yeah,
they've also done studies for post prison uh in two
thousand seven at the University of Washington, they said prisoners
(25:51):
released directly from supermax into the community committed crime sooner
than prisoners who have been transferred, even if only for
a few months before release to a general prison population. Yeah,
I saw that too, And the I think the basis
of that is that you don't have social support or
(26:12):
social stimulation from other people, right, even if it's somebody
you don't really like, if you're interacting with them, you're
getting something from interacting with them, right. And one of
the problems that you run into in solitary apparently is
you start to focus on stuff. Very small things can
become the basis of like raging anger and psychosis and um,
(26:37):
because there's nobody there to tell you like, that's not
that big of a deal, or man, just let it go.
There's no one there to give you that social support,
to to just let you talk off the ledge exactly,
So the smallest thing can become something of immense important
and if it, if it clicks with something like your rage,
(26:59):
you're gonna space in the indefinite time you're in solitary
thinking about that one thing and stewing, Like think about
when you stew over something, right, and and just how
it gets harder and harder to let go the more
you stew You're just making that neural pathway stronger and
stronger thinking about it. Imagine having nothing but that to
(27:20):
think about for years. Apparently it's a really bad side
effect of solitary, and that comes from not having that
social interaction with people to say you're being weird. Well,
and this is just me talking, but I imagine it
doesn't increase your sense of empathy because you you gain
empathy by interacting with people. So if you're released directly
(27:43):
into the public at large etter being in super max,
you just don't have that that normal day to day
interaction with people, So you may be more likely to
commit a crime because you don't care about other people.
That would be It's it's a pretty reasonable explanation to me. Uh,
and then you know, we'll take a break here in
a second. But another a big impact is simply the
financial burden that taxpayers pay it. And I went through
(28:06):
this one uh uh paper academic paper on the cost,
and it's really varies all over the place. But I'll
just say one of the time, it costs a lot
more money to house someone in solitary or super max
than a regular prison population. I mean, I've seen it
(28:26):
kind of all over the map. Our article says, uh
fifty eight thousand dollars a year for a regular seventy
eight grand per year. It's kind of all over the place,
but those are pretty in line. It's it's always a
lot more money. But I mean, how would you even
keep track of that if if different prisons have different
definitions for you know, solitary confinement. At the very least,
(28:47):
we need to get this stuff standardized. This step one yeah, yeah, Um,
all right, let's take our final break and uh we'll
come back and talk a little bit more about the
rest of the world. And um, shall we touch on
the angle of three case? All right, so you said
(29:31):
this is a American export, Um, it does happen all
over the world, but there are countries, UH, specifically England
and some other European countries that have UM kind of
seen the light uh in a way of reform. UM.
They rarely use it in England anymore. UH. In the
(29:52):
nineteen eighties they started kind of thinking about it and saying,
you know what, maybe either thing to do is is
incentivized are most dangerous prisoners, give them a little bit
more control and give them incentives for good behavior rather
than just the threat of punishment for bad behavior. And
(30:12):
they found that it worked. Um. There was much less
violence uh when they were housed in units of ten
people rather than being in those individual cells where they
could earn privileges like ah, more contact with other people,
more phone calls, more visits. UH. They found it had UH.
They said, the results have been impressive. The use of
(30:33):
long term isolation in England is now negligible. So they
found good results. UH. And then it just seems like
more and more states UM are enacting things like uh
like juveniles should never be in isolation. I think I
should never be. Yeah New York did I think just
(30:53):
in the last couple of years, even I think Obama
abandoned in those two in federal prison as well mentally
ill in the um. Yeah, juveniles can't be People under
twenty one can't be kept in solitary because apparently, if
it is having these pronounced effects on the brain, it
would have even larger effects on the developing brain of
(31:16):
a juvenile. Absolutely, so that that would be really bad. Yeah,
that was the case I was talking about before with
the the NPR story. That kid. I think he was
sixteen at the time, seventeen when it started the incarceration,
and he was still developing. He said. At the end
he said he was twenty one, he felt like he
was forty and then you know, like I said, he
(31:39):
killed himself within a year after he got out. Really sad.
And this is again, this is not some hard and criminal.
He was never convicted of a crime. Right, he was
in pre trial holding, right? Is that clear? Uh? Who
else this? Juan mindez Um, he's a u N I've
(31:59):
never heard of this title? Are un special? Yeah? Have
you heard of that? It's fancy? Yeah, what is that?
It's like a special investigator there, Like we we want
to know about this, So we're gonna ask you to
go out and find out everything you can and give
us a report. I think it's a reporter in French,
so you win. Uh. He presented a report in sixteen,
(32:23):
just last year to the General Assembly that basically said,
there's a trend towards reform all over the world when
it comes to solitary and the writing is kind of
on the wall that this is it's it's just making
things worse. Yes. The thing is, though, is there's a
lot of people who still say, especially inside UM Bureaus
of Corrections, that say, no, this is not you. You're
(32:47):
all being played for fools. This is not a problem,
and it's very useful. And there was actually a study
UM by the Colorado Bureau of Corrections Department of Corrections,
one of the two UM they they funded it or
one of their researchers carried it out, and it found
that UM that the mental health of inmates can actually
(33:08):
improve in solitary confinement. And everyone was like, that isn't
it's strange that this is the only study that has
ever found anything like that. It's it was funded by
the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado UM, and the methodology
has been attacked as a very controversial study. But what
(33:29):
gets me is that critics of the study have used
the same criticism that critics of the UM studies that
show solitary confinement is problematic used, which is they they
said that the reason the prisoners were just telling the
researchers what they think they wanted to hear, which is like,
I'm doing great. I've actually thought about how how how
(33:52):
bad my crime was, so you could probably let me
out now, you know, so that that that study. I
didn't read the study, but from what I understand, it's
it's there's flaws to it, and it's the only one
that came up with that. You think that if if
the Bereau of Corrections had come up with something substantial,
(34:14):
every state prison system would be running the same tests
to find now and to back up their case. Right.
You know who's really big on this is uh David Simon,
the guy who created the wire. He is uh kind
of and and you know what we should finish well,
I don't know if it will be the last one,
but we should totally do one on private prisons. Um.
(34:37):
We touched on that a little bit in Prisons, but
that deserves its own show. That's sort of one of
his big um things. He's Uh, I guess what you'd
call it a passion project now is trying to and
he's super smart guy. Like hearing an interview with him
is really really interesting. But uh, yeah, it's kind of
one of the things he's dedicating us work two now
(34:58):
is exposing these for profit prisons and incarceration as an
industry in the United States. He just testified in front
of Congress recently, right, so it wouldn't surprise me. Um,
should we talk about the Angola three case a little bit? Yes? Please?
So our house Stuff Works article starts with an intro
(35:19):
about a man named Albert Wood Fox and he was
one of the infamous Angola Three from Angola, Louisiana State Prison,
which is known as the bloodiest prison in the South. Uh.
And originally these three men, Albert wood Fox, Herman Wallace,
and Robert King were sent to prison for armed robbery
(35:40):
and once they got in there, they started a Black
Panther chapter within prison and tried to expose some of
the atrocities going on in prison, how they retreated what
was going on with the guards. And that was not
a popular move to say the least, So, uh, they
(36:00):
did things like hunger strikes, work strikes started to get
a lot of attention in the nineteen seventies calling for
an investigations and so and Gola said, you guys are
going in solitary UM forever. Yeah, apparently that's that's something
that is commonly used for as well as to squash
dissent or criticism of the prison system or the prison rules. Yeah,
(36:23):
that's pretty awful. It is so UM Albert wood Fox,
who was kind of the focus of this article that
I read, he was in prison, UH in solitary for
forty five years, and they're not positive, but they think
that he is the person who was in solitary confinement
(36:44):
the longest in the United States forty five years. Dude.
I know, the fact that he's out and walking talking
is pretty insane. There's another one of his um, his
buddies or at least fellow inmates, UH is still in
in lockdown UM in Angola and has been since I
(37:07):
think the eighties, right, Yeah, I don't This wasn't one
of the Angola three, but it was a guy named
George Gibson and he is an Angola. Yeah, he's been
in lockdown since. And these are six by I mean
not like eight by ten is big, but these were
six by nine ft cells. And UM, here's the thing
they were. You know, if you look at the evidence,
(37:30):
there's a lot of documentaries and um, I mean, you know,
very famous cases. They were essentially put in lockdown to
squash this descent. But what they were officially put in
for was for killing a prison guard. Um. But according
to most people, that did not happen. It was not them. Uh.
There were so many inconsistencies or obfuscations. There were missteps.
(37:53):
There was a bloody print at the murder scene that
didn't match any of these guys. Uh. They never compare
that bloody handprint too or was it a handprint or
a footprint I had to print? They never compared that
to any of the other prisoners and that were had
access to potentially kill this guard. And there were very
(38:15):
few people that even could have done this. It's not
like it was the whole prison population. Uh. There was
DNA evidence that could have freed them that was conveniently
lost by prison officials. Uh. They had plenty of alibi
witnesses that had nothing to gain, Like they didn't get
an exchange, uh for for anything like good behavior to
get more free time. They said, these guys weren't anywhere
(38:37):
near the murder scene at the time. These other prisoners
and their main witness, Hezekiah Brown Uh. Basically in retrospect,
everyone says, this guy lied under oath so he could
get more privileges. He was a serial rapist serving life,
and he agreed to testify an exchange for more cigarettes,
(38:58):
birthday cakes TV time and the birthday cakes was kind
of interesting. Bert Uh and the warden later on when
he was reminiscing in this documentary, the warden of the
prison said, Hezekiah was one of these guys where you
could put words in his mouth, and so they were
essentially enough doubt to where the family members of the
(39:19):
guard that was killed said, we don't think these guys
did it, and we want to find out who did it.
And eventually they were. They were all freed for different reasons.
One of them, Herman, was freed because despite all this
misconduct in the investigation, in the trial Uh and constitutional
(39:40):
violations and racism, he was eventually freed because they excluded
women um from one of his trials, which is a
violation of the fourteenth Amendment, which was interesting. And he
died three days after he got out of cancer I know,
very tragic. Uh. Albert was finally released h um, but
(40:00):
not because of uh, I'm sorry. Albert was was not
released because of continued practicing of black pantherism. They called it.
That's not even a real thing. You can't make that up.
You can't keep somebody in there for that. What. Yeah.
And then finally in two sixteen, after forty three years
(40:22):
and ten months I think we said forty five years, um,
Albert was released, uh from isolation and from prison, which
is I'm sure there's a movie in the works about
these guys. But again, there was no transition process, right.
He was just in solitary confined one day and then
the next day he's out of prison, not just out
of solitary, out of prison. And from what I've from
(40:44):
from what the research I've run across, it's if you
were in solitary, you are more likely to commit a crime,
You are less able to identify with other people. And
if the point of prison is to rehabilitate people, or
at the very least to um not release them until
they're they're ready to be rejoint society, yeah, then solitary
(41:07):
confinement is the antithesis of that. You're stripping someone of
their humanity and their ability to relate to humanity on
a physiological neurological level. So it runs contrary to our
ideas of prisons. Yeah. And if you're thinking, what about
the Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual punishment, that seems like
(41:28):
and many cases like an open and shut kind of thing.
But um, there's never been a ruling on that. Now
the courts said not today, and in the mood today,
here's some other day, because after all, who cares about
the inmates, right? Their inmates, their criminals. Uh. If you
(41:49):
want to know more about inmates and criminals and solitary confinement,
you can type those words in the search part how
stuff works dot com. Since I said search parts, time
for listener mail. All right, a quick correction first. Um,
it's called World Geography with Josh Part two. I get
(42:12):
a wrong a lot. Uh just sit there and check
out maps. Well, I'm the worst world geography, but you
love maps. I do love maps, which is weird. I think.
I just I don't talk about it because I know
I'm not any good at it. Uh So in our
famine episode, I think you said, what were the two
countries Botswana and Ethiopia. Yeah, we're neighbor, they're not a
(42:36):
few thousand miles apart. A couple of thousand, not a
few thousand, all right, So we like the correct things
we get wrong. Um. And another thing we got wrong
in Jess was, um, when we did our listener mail
from Australia with the Assie lingo. Yeah, surely the Australians
got that we were joking, right, I don't think so.
(42:57):
We got a lot of response saying guys, you got
it so wrong. Yeah, they like kind of exasperated, like,
how did you how did you get it this wrong?
We were just kidding around. Yeah, we knew we were
wrong on that stuff. Where is that famous Australian sense
of humor? But um, I'm gonna read this one from
Matt just because it's the first one that came up
(43:18):
on my phone because it didn't have one prepared. You're
like the Assassin and no Country for Old Minton. It's
all about fake What a great movie. Um. So officially,
Matt says Marca's is McDonald's. Didn't know that. That's not true.
He said it rhymes with packers, Green Bay packers, so macers,
(43:39):
I guess bottle. Oh is where you buy alcohol. That's wrong? Uh, servo, chuck,
You got it right. It was a petrol station. Okay,
maybe that one. Dirries or cigarettes round to the curries,
also called darts or cancer sticks. Wrong, Piste is drunk,
we know that. I don't know what you said in jest.
(44:00):
Thought your bit was really funny. It wasn't that funny.
I wasn't very happy with myself. It could have been
way funnier. I thought it was good. Um. Although he
says Piste is drunk enough to not drive, I don't
know what that means in Australia. I know where that
line is because you veer off the road. You're just
in the outback. As long as you have some water
and you're drunk, you're fine. A stubby is a beer.
(44:21):
It's specifically a three hundred and seventy five millilite a
bottle of beer. Three pint. It's a pint, okay, Why
why don't you just call it a pint? He said.
It's also a style of Tradesmen work shorts with a
pocket big enough to hold a bottle of beer. We
call those cargo shorts or beer shorts. Um. A slab
(44:42):
is a case of beer, which is twenty four of stubbies. Okay,
um v B plus stubbies means from Victoria, like me,
Victoria bitter beer is a vb um Foster's also it's
probably Victorian from the Carlton United Breweries Carlton as his
(45:02):
Melbourne brewery. Uh. In fact, the first ever artificial ice
created was to make beer cold in Australia. What interesting?
And he says, by the way, there's a lot of
Aussie slang that is not relevant travel books. I read
them myself and laugh as nobody in Australia talks that way.
It's a big fat joke that every Aussie can convince
(45:25):
his foreigners. Danger is girt, g u r t ste.
You're clear of girt, drop bears, hoop snakes and yawi's
I didn't even know what's going on now. I think
a hoop snake if that's another name for hookworm. Okay,
what's a drop bear? The drop bear is the it's
your fecal material containing hookworm eggs. And yeah, he's that's
(45:49):
what you say when you drop a hoop bear for
getting a famous hoop slanging fight. Boy, I could see
how this could be an endless cycle of emails forever
and ever, let's keep it going kind of like a
hookworm life cycle. Uh. The above written is true today,
as your contributor wrote, no trademarks involves as far as
I know, Stubby work shorts origin might be contested. And
(46:13):
that is from Matt. Thanks Matt. What does Matt mean
in Australia? How you like your feet before you enter
a dwelling? Okay, thanks Matt. If you want to get
in touch of this, like Matt did, you can tweet
to us at s Y s K podcast. I'm also
at josh um Clark check me out. You can hang
on with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant
(46:35):
and at Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an emails to Stuff podcast at house stuffworks dot com
and has always joined us at home on the web.
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics, does it how Stuff Works
dot com. M
Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know
what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let
people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the
sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right, it's t r
y pod. Still in nascent industry. A lot of people
don't know what podcasts are and helps everybody out if
(00:20):
you would go out and just say, hey, family member,
who I see it? Thanksgiving once a year? Right, you
should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what
they are. Here's a cool show you should try, and
here's how to get it. Yeah, and it doesn't have
to be our show, just any podcast you like in
general that you think someone else would like, just share it. Yeah,
So get on board the dry pod train. Welcome to
(00:44):
Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is Stuff you
should know. Crime and Punishment Party eight Yeah, yeah, and
(01:10):
a lot of stuff on this And I thought we've
got more coming. I kept keep saying we're done, but
we're not done. Because while we touched on solitary confinement,
in Our Prisons episode, which was a great one, was it.
Have you gone back and listen recently. You're just making
assumption now, I just remember it being a good one.
It stands out. It's one of our good ones. Uh,
(01:32):
this is um, you know, a little more robust. Look,
it's solitary confinement and the ins and outs mostly outs,
don't you think? Yes? And not just me. There's like
a whole growing body of people who are kind of
(01:52):
screaming their heads off. I guess, yeah, saying like, hey,
put a person in a tiny room with no interaction
or stimulation twenty three hours a day. Not good for
you as a human right, And a lot of people
are going so far as to say this, this constitutes
cruel and in human punishment. Yeah, it's kind of like
zukosis for humans. We talked about that in Our Zoo's episode. Yeah, um,
(02:16):
you know, yeah, where the animal goes insane. Yeah. What
it's not is Steve McQueen in The Great Escape throwing
the baseball against the wall. Let's probably do that for
like a half hour. No, they wouldn't give you a baseball.
Oh that's true. You know, there's nothing funny you're cute
about it right, um, all right, shall we Yeah, that's
(02:41):
so solitary. It is a huge controversial thing right now
because some a lot of proponents say it's extremely necessary
and that this is just the way that you're supposed
to punish people, or that it's just needed even without
punishment or um. Other people say, no, this is cool
(03:01):
and in human, like we said, regardless of how you
slice it is actually an American product, it's an American export.
It's being used all over the world right now. Yeah,
And depending on where you are and what prison you're in,
they might call it something else. They have a lot
of I mean, in this article the house Stuff Works article,
they you know, call it like lockdown, restrictive housing, segregation, isolation.
(03:25):
But I saw a lot more uh creative names that
prisons use that you know, try to shine it up
a bit as something other than what it is. Right,
But in what it is, no matter what you call
it is, it's confining a prisoner to a relatively small
cell um I saw usually eight by ten or less.
(03:47):
And I also saw that frequently compared to a horse stable,
in which comparison the um the prison cell actually comes
out the smaller of the two and you confine that
and this is the key you can find that person
to that small selfer between twenty three and twenty four
hours a day every day. Yeah, well I think twenty
(04:10):
They like some people never leave. It depends on the day.
So uh, in some cases you'll be confined like that
for twenty three hours a day and then one hour
a day you get out to exercise and um shower.
But maybe that's just on week days. So a weekend
you would be in there for forty eight straight hours
(04:33):
or longer. If the guard doesn't like you or is
in a bad mood, they might just not let you
out that day, right, And we don't want to paint
corrections officers, as you know, the movies do a good
enough job of demonizing them. Yeah, And if you look
into the some of the people who are being held
(04:54):
in solitary, some of the people who started solitary or
have stayed in their longest, you kind of understand why
someone would want to keep them as far away from
people as possible, you know. So, like it's it's a
it's a it's a complex issue. It's not cut and dried.
There's not an obvious villain in this story, and an
obvious victim in this story. Yeah, so, like I was saying, Um,
(05:15):
we don't want to demonize them because it's happened enough
in media and certainly films. Tom Hanks aside, I guess
in The Green Mile, he just he can't help but
be delightful. Uh, he played a well. He was actually
kind of I was about to say Road to Perdition.
He was the good guy. He was an anti hero though, Yeah,
(05:35):
a bit of an anti hero. But uh, anyway, we're
not gonna do that. But that does still happen, you know. There.
That's why prison reform is still a thing, because there's
still is a lot of abuse that happens in certain
prisons and among certain prison guards and uh, correctional officers.
So uh, it's certainly not something that's been solved. Uh.
(05:56):
I just like to see away a little bit because
I know that we have prison guards that listen to
our show, and Chuck, we we should say the whole
point of solitary is to limit human contact as much
as possible. Yeah, so even though you are maybe interacting
with a guard here there, it's when they slide your
meal in three times a day, and that's it. You
(06:18):
don't see people. You um, you exercise alone. Everything you're
doing is alone. And that's the point. That's why they
call it solitary confinement. It is uh. So there's a
couple of types of segregation that can happen. One's called
disciplinary segregation. That is uh pretty obvious you have done
(06:38):
something that has run a foul of the prison rules um,
which can range from legitimate things like you know, you
start a fight, or you attacked another inmate or you
know what, caught with an extra honey bun maybe so,
or you you stole something um too a little more
petty things and that's where that's where materia gets real hinky,
(07:01):
Like maybe you talk back to a guard and they
didn't like hearing that, so they're like, all right, you
got to the hole for thirty days, right, Or maybe
somebody um snitched on you and you were framed clearing
clearing simple, right. So that's disciplinary segregation. There's also administrative segregation,
and this is UM. You might be put in there
(07:21):
if let's say you're a sex offender who notoriously have
a rough time in prison, or you're a gang member
who has started some trouble and you know Basically they're
trying to protect uh supposedly trying to protect the prisoner
from harm. Yeah, by isolating them from the population. Yeah,
(07:42):
but whether they whether they want to stay in the
regular population or not, that decisions made for them, right,
And that's just one type of administrative Um. You can
also be put in if the regular cells are full
and they're just full up, so sorry, you gotta go
to solitary. Uh, with overcrowding, that's obviously a big deal. Um,
(08:03):
pre trial you can go in if you're not even
convicted of a crime yet, this might be put in solitary.
There should be a constitutional amendment that prevents that. Yeah,
I read the story. Actually, I heard it on NPR
this weekend, which is what made me think of this thing. Uh.
There's a documentary on Spike TV called the Calif Browder Story.
(08:23):
Is that the kid who stole the backpack? Yeah? Did
you hear that? No, I just knew about it while
it was going on. Yeah, this this guy, Calif Browder um,
when he was I think he was sixteen at the time, UM,
stole a backpack from a party. He and his buddy
get uh get I don't. I don't know if they're
in a car, got pulled over, but they get arrested.
(08:45):
They let the one guy go, but Calif Browder had
a prior charge, so they kept him for more than
three years in uh the Rikers Island Jail complex, and
a lot of that was in solitary confinement, confinement, and
this before like ultimately the charges were dropped. He wasn't
even convicted of a crime, and he was in solitary
for three years. He finally gets out. He committed suicide
(09:08):
lessening year after. And it's just one of the geez
one of the more egregious and sad examples of just
how broken the system can be here in the United States.
The the another UM way that it's being used that's
just as egregious as pre trial UM in my opinion,
is to house the mentally ill right after after the eighties,
(09:34):
when Reagan closed down the massive institutions that had become
like huge places of abuse of the mentally ill in
favor of um more community servicing of mental health, but
then didn't fund the communities, so that the mentally ill
just ended up on the street. Right prison became the
(09:57):
new institutions for housing mentally ill people well apparently a
favorite place to actually house the mentally ill in prison
is in solitary confinement. And as we'll see, UM, ostensibly
just being put in solitary confinement if you have a
completely healthy mind is really really bad for your mental state.
(10:19):
If you're already mentally ill or predisposed of mental illness,
it can be a death sentence for you. Yeah, and
uh in the United States, UM, they don't have exact
numbers because uh, it's just you know, states vary and
what they consider confinement solitary confinement. UM. Not a lot
of prisons want to participate in studies. There's no reporting,
(10:42):
not very much, you know. UM, but I have the impression, Chuck,
that you could be like a congress person saying like
I want to tour your solitary wing and you would
get turned out. There's like that level of um self
administration by the Bureau of Corrections inside prisons. Yeah. So
the number very but UM basically most people say up
(11:03):
to a hundred thousand inmates in the United States, And again,
not all of these are in prison. Some of them
are in jail, some of them or in uh uh
immigrant temporary immigrant housing uh are kept in isolation. And Um,
there isn't a You don't go before a court to
get put in the whole you you know, a prison
(11:25):
official will dictate this. There is no recourse for a prisoner.
They call the shots. There's no oversight, can be indefinite.
You can't call your attorney and say, hey, I'm in
solitary and I didn't do anything. All that is talk back.
I've been in here for six months because the guard
has a problem with me. Um, there's nothing that can
be done, basically no. So that makes it an extra
judicial punishment with no oversight from judges or juries, which
(11:52):
is that's that's not good. And it's really widespread, not
just in the United States but around the world. Now, yeah,
well let's take a break and we'll come back and
talk a little bit about how this all got started.
Right after this, so Chuck I said earlier that this
(12:37):
is an American invention, right, It's actually an American Quaker invention.
The Friends Society of Friends came up with the idea
of solitary confinement first, and I feel like we talked
about this in the Prison episode two. The whole idea
was that, Um, at the time, you know you might
be put to to labor or work or um just
(12:59):
left to hang around your fellow inmates in jail. And
the idea behind solitary originally that the Quakers came up
with was that you should be given time to reflect
on your punishment and quiet solitude, and the hope was
that eventually you would become penitent and be redeemed. And
that's where the word penitentiary came from to describe prisons.
(13:21):
That's right. This is the late eighteenth century when they
came up with it at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia,
which sounds lovely. It does sound kind of like a
nice place to be. I bet it wasn't. Uh. Flash
forward a bit to the kind of early third of
the eighteen hundreds and eighteen twenty nine Eastern State Penitentiary
in Pennsylvania. They said, you know what, we're gonna try
(13:44):
experimenting with how we deal with prisoners, and we're gonna
try this thing called lockdown. Uh. They found that it
didn't work very well. These inmates were socially dysfunctional, a
lot of them killed themselves, and so in eighteen twenty
nine they abandoned it and said, this is not a
good idea Yeah, within the first forty years of it
(14:04):
being invented, they're like, no, we shouldn't be doing this
to people. And they went in favor of the Auburn
State Prison and Upstate New York's method of putting people
the hard labor that became the the um the what
you what you did when you got sent to prison,
rather than put into solitary, and they kept solitary around
like you didn't go away entirely, Like basically every prison
(14:27):
had a hole. You get thrown in the hole, but
you get thrown in the hole for like days or
weeks or something like that to punish you for something
you did in the prison. Yeah, and they still say,
like experts still say it can be a useful tool
in prison if you do put someone in there for
three to five days or I think the u N
says no more than two weeks, fifteen days, I think
(14:48):
is what they came up with. Yeah, So you know,
the point is is not to say like, well, I mean,
I'm sure there are tons of people that say you
shouldn't do it at all, but experts say that it
can be a deterrent for you know, poor behavior or
whatever in prison. But people being in there for months
and years is the issue at hand. So it was
used sparingly, but it was still around throughout the most
(15:10):
of the twentieth century. Alcatraz famously had D Block, which
was like a solitary block. Um. But then on October
twenty everything changed in the current incarnation of the use
of solitary confinement was born on that day at Marian Prison,
Marian Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois. So there were two
(15:34):
different incidents where prison guards were killed that day. Yes,
it's not two separate things, right, yeah, And um, the
the warden put the prison on lockdown and just kept
it there. And what the warden basically invented in in
retaliation for these two murders on this day was what's
(15:54):
now known as a super max prison. It's where all
of the prisoners are kept ultimately in isolation for twenty
three to twenty four hours a day, uh, throughout the prison.
And it's like a prison within a prison. Each inmate
is in their own individual prison within the larger prison,
and that's called super max prison. Yeah, and we talked
(16:16):
about those a lot in the Prisons episode. These became
uh uh not the new standard because you know, not
all prisons of super max. But they became more widespread
for sure through the nineties, um partially because of Bill
Clinton in he signed the very famous crime Bill, which,
(16:36):
among other things and it was famously known as the
three strikes Bill. Well, yeah, that's what created the exploding
prison population in large part. Yeah. And Clinton he still
defends this as um going a long way to alleviate crime. Uh,
even like during this most recent election he was being
called out for it and and saying like this was,
(16:59):
you know, a good thing, and um, the detractors still say, no,
this is what started in a big, big way incarceration
as as a business model in this country. Yeah. And
apparently the US now has twent of the global prison
population but only five percent of the global population as
(17:21):
a whole. Yeah, that's really disproportionate. And apparently we're second
at least on paper to the Seychelles um for the
percentage of people in prison. Every seven hundred sixteen of
every hundred thousand people in the US is in prison,
and in the Seychells it's seven of every hundred thousand.
(17:44):
But stay shells as a population of so that kind
of excuse it. And they think that the largest prison
state really is um North Korea that it has a
larger port proportion of its population in prison the US.
So technically the U s would be number three, but
we would just be trailing North Korea. It's not something
(18:06):
you want to trail. It's not not a country that
you want to be super close to as far as
like prison population percentages. No. Um. So, like we said before,
there are even experts that say that solitary confinement can
have a place in prison as a deterrent for bad behavior. UM.
(18:26):
And like I mentioned earlier, two separate things here. Bad
behavior is one, but you know, mentally ill, we just
don't have enough space. Um. You know all these other
reasons of the truly abhorrent ones. UM. But like I said,
deterrent is a big one. UM. There there is a
lot of legitimacy to protecting UM prisoners from fellow prisoners.
(18:50):
They're at high risk for being injured or killed, that's
legit obviously. If they're a danger, you know, have attacked
guards or other inmates, then uh a need for separation,
like you can make a case you know there for sure, Um,
if they're prone to escape, yeah, maybe they need their
(19:10):
own little room. I mean, that's that's one of the
big ones that for for proponents of super max prisons
that like this is it's a prison within a prison,
and they have to get out of that first prison
and then they're still in the other prison. It just
just makes it much more difficult to get out. Yeah,
I mean, you escape and you go on and commit
more crimes, murder someone while are on the lamb Uh.
(19:31):
You can definitely make an argument that keeping people like that, um,
these repeat offenders or repeat escape e offenders in solitary.
So those are some of the arguments for Yeah. And
then I I don't know if you said it already,
but that having that extra way to punish someone who's
already in prison is another reason proponents say you need
(19:54):
to have this as a tool to kind of maintain order,
like if you legitimately run a foul of rules or yeah,
like yeah, exactly, because I mean, if you if you
kill another inmates, sensibly you're going to go through trial again,
but the you know that you could be executed for
for that, and that would be different than just being
(20:17):
in prison. But if you weren't, then that's basically like, oh,
you're in prison for life. Already, Well we're gonna add
another life sentence onto that, you know, Like, there's only
so much you can do to someone who's in prison
short of executing them. Uh, And the solid solitary confinement,
proponents say provides that extra layer, right. And the reason
(20:40):
it provides that extra deterrent though, is because of the
impact it has been shown to have on the mind
of inmates. And there's a few problems with this. Before
we get into it, we should say there's they're very
little studies. And one of the reasons why there there
are so few studies is because there's so little access
(21:02):
to prisoners in solitary confinement by researchers. It's just not allowed.
They're just kept out. Yeah. I saw a lot of
these studies were longitudinal studies about isolation of the elderly
and like the effect it can have on them. Well,
there's a big worry I've seen that that's like the
next health crisis is going to be loneliness and disconnectedness. Um.
(21:25):
But yeah, that's that's where they've gotten a lot of
the data because the the prisoners are unavailable for study
there in solitary and in that same vein possibly disingenuously. Um.
The ones that have been able to be interviewed say
they've gotten out of prison and now they're available to
be interviewed. Um. The proponents of um SO of solitary
(21:51):
confinement say that the prisoners are just they're just telling
researchers what they think they want to hear, or they're
really playing up their story or whatever. But what they
found is that there there seems to be a basis
for the idea that there are demonstrably negative impacts on
mental health that are possibly permanent and irreversible that comes
(22:15):
from staying in solitary confinement for prolonged times. Yeah, I
mean there have been some studies. There was one on
the Pelican Bay Prison in California, and it said, Uh,
people in solitary for long periods, uh, suffer from depression, anxiety, apathy, hallucinations,
panic attacks, paranoia. Um, this is a big one. Hypersensitivity
(22:36):
external stimuli basically sound and light. Right. Uh. Sometimes they're
kept in the dark. Sometimes the light never goes off,
so they you know, have no sense of you know,
no circadian rhythm of day or night, which makes sleep
extraordinarily difficult to Apparently, prisoners who are in solitary will
(22:58):
basically stay in bed all day and then they don't
sleep much at night. But they're not really getting good
sleep during the day either, So it's not like the
circadian rhythm has flip flopped. It's been spread out over
the day rather than um so which prevents it from
getting actually real rest because they're constantly at rest. Uh.
(23:20):
What else difficulties UM thinking, concentration, memory, UM, they become
angry and violent, they could suffer from dizziness, UM, heart palpitations, perspiration.
Basically like we're saying, zukosis, Like you're trapped in this
little box and it's not like, well, you can just
read all day and educate yourself or something, or paint well.
(23:42):
And in cases where they are, yes, because a lot
of times they're not given those things. But most time
you're you're not allowed any form of stimulation or entertainment.
So in in plenty of cases you are, like, you're
still allowed to say books or something like that. But
apparently one of the things you run into very quickly
in solitary is you lose your taste for reading, even
(24:03):
though that's all you have to do, because you can't
remember what you read a few pages previously, so you're
you're having so many problems with your memory that you're
not able to retain enough of what you're reading to
make a book worthwhile. So you just stopped reading after
a while. Wow. Uh so where could this lead in
(24:26):
a physical sense? Um? They have done studies and they
show that if you're in solitary for extended periods, you
have a higher rate of self mutilation and suicide. Um.
They did one five year study from two thousand four
in California, I think, in their whole prison system, and
almost fifty of all inmate suicides were committed by those
(24:50):
in isolation. And see, that's a tough thing for someone
who who uh doesn't believe that that that isolation is
a real problem. That's a that's a that's a tough
one for them to just get rid of. Because the
other stuff, you can say, well, that's all self reporting
by a prisoner in solitary, So maybe they're just kind
(25:10):
of making it up or playing it up if they're
mutilating themselves. One guy mutilated his own genitalia, another person
blinded himself. Um, and then you have all of these
um completed or attempted suicides. Uh. Those are like hard
numbers that you just can't ignore that. You would think
(25:31):
people otherwise wouldn't do that if they weren't in solitary
or else the solitary population wouldn't represent such a high
proportion of suicides and attempted suicides in the prison, you know. Yeah,
they've also done studies for post prison uh in two
thousand seven at the University of Washington, they said prisoners
(25:51):
released directly from supermax into the community committed crime sooner
than prisoners who have been transferred, even if only for
a few months before release to a general prison population. Yeah,
I saw that too, And the I think the basis
of that is that you don't have social support or
(26:12):
social stimulation from other people, right, even if it's somebody
you don't really like, if you're interacting with them, you're
getting something from interacting with them, right. And one of
the problems that you run into in solitary apparently is
you start to focus on stuff. Very small things can
become the basis of like raging anger and psychosis and um,
(26:37):
because there's nobody there to tell you like, that's not
that big of a deal, or man, just let it go.
There's no one there to give you that social support,
to to just let you talk off the ledge exactly,
So the smallest thing can become something of immense important
and if it, if it clicks with something like your rage,
(26:59):
you're gonna space in the indefinite time you're in solitary
thinking about that one thing and stewing, Like think about
when you stew over something, right, and and just how
it gets harder and harder to let go the more
you stew You're just making that neural pathway stronger and
stronger thinking about it. Imagine having nothing but that to
(27:20):
think about for years. Apparently it's a really bad side
effect of solitary, and that comes from not having that
social interaction with people to say you're being weird. Well,
and this is just me talking, but I imagine it
doesn't increase your sense of empathy because you you gain
empathy by interacting with people. So if you're released directly
(27:43):
into the public at large etter being in super max,
you just don't have that that normal day to day
interaction with people, So you may be more likely to
commit a crime because you don't care about other people.
That would be It's it's a pretty reasonable explanation to me. Uh,
and then you know, we'll take a break here in
a second. But another a big impact is simply the
financial burden that taxpayers pay it. And I went through
(28:06):
this one uh uh paper academic paper on the cost,
and it's really varies all over the place. But I'll
just say one of the time, it costs a lot
more money to house someone in solitary or super max
than a regular prison population. I mean, I've seen it
(28:26):
kind of all over the map. Our article says, uh
fifty eight thousand dollars a year for a regular seventy
eight grand per year. It's kind of all over the place,
but those are pretty in line. It's it's always a
lot more money. But I mean, how would you even
keep track of that if if different prisons have different
definitions for you know, solitary confinement. At the very least,
(28:47):
we need to get this stuff standardized. This step one yeah, yeah, Um,
all right, let's take our final break and uh we'll
come back and talk a little bit more about the
rest of the world. And um, shall we touch on
the angle of three case? All right, so you said
(29:31):
this is a American export, Um, it does happen all
over the world, but there are countries, UH, specifically England
and some other European countries that have UM kind of
seen the light uh in a way of reform. UM.
They rarely use it in England anymore. UH. In the
(29:52):
nineteen eighties they started kind of thinking about it and saying,
you know what, maybe either thing to do is is
incentivized are most dangerous prisoners, give them a little bit
more control and give them incentives for good behavior rather
than just the threat of punishment for bad behavior. And
(30:12):
they found that it worked. Um. There was much less
violence uh when they were housed in units of ten
people rather than being in those individual cells where they
could earn privileges like ah, more contact with other people,
more phone calls, more visits. UH. They found it had UH.
They said, the results have been impressive. The use of
(30:33):
long term isolation in England is now negligible. So they
found good results. UH. And then it just seems like
more and more states UM are enacting things like uh
like juveniles should never be in isolation. I think I
should never be. Yeah New York did I think just
(30:53):
in the last couple of years, even I think Obama
abandoned in those two in federal prison as well mentally
ill in the um. Yeah, juveniles can't be People under
twenty one can't be kept in solitary because apparently, if
it is having these pronounced effects on the brain, it
would have even larger effects on the developing brain of
(31:16):
a juvenile. Absolutely, so that that would be really bad. Yeah,
that was the case I was talking about before with
the the NPR story. That kid. I think he was
sixteen at the time, seventeen when it started the incarceration,
and he was still developing. He said. At the end
he said he was twenty one, he felt like he
was forty and then you know, like I said, he
(31:39):
killed himself within a year after he got out. Really sad.
And this is again, this is not some hard and criminal.
He was never convicted of a crime. Right, he was
in pre trial holding, right? Is that clear? Uh? Who
else this? Juan mindez Um, he's a u N I've
(31:59):
never heard of this title? Are un special? Yeah? Have
you heard of that? It's fancy? Yeah, what is that?
It's like a special investigator there, Like we we want
to know about this, So we're gonna ask you to
go out and find out everything you can and give
us a report. I think it's a reporter in French,
so you win. Uh. He presented a report in sixteen,
(32:23):
just last year to the General Assembly that basically said,
there's a trend towards reform all over the world when
it comes to solitary and the writing is kind of
on the wall that this is it's it's just making
things worse. Yes. The thing is, though, is there's a
lot of people who still say, especially inside UM Bureaus
of Corrections, that say, no, this is not you. You're
(32:47):
all being played for fools. This is not a problem,
and it's very useful. And there was actually a study
UM by the Colorado Bureau of Corrections Department of Corrections,
one of the two UM they they funded it or
one of their researchers carried it out, and it found
that UM that the mental health of inmates can actually
(33:08):
improve in solitary confinement. And everyone was like, that isn't
it's strange that this is the only study that has
ever found anything like that. It's it was funded by
the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado UM, and the methodology
has been attacked as a very controversial study. But what
(33:29):
gets me is that critics of the study have used
the same criticism that critics of the UM studies that
show solitary confinement is problematic used, which is they they
said that the reason the prisoners were just telling the
researchers what they think they wanted to hear, which is like,
I'm doing great. I've actually thought about how how how
(33:52):
bad my crime was, so you could probably let me
out now, you know, so that that that study. I
didn't read the study, but from what I understand, it's
it's there's flaws to it, and it's the only one
that came up with that. You think that if if
the Bereau of Corrections had come up with something substantial,
(34:14):
every state prison system would be running the same tests
to find now and to back up their case. Right.
You know who's really big on this is uh David Simon,
the guy who created the wire. He is uh kind
of and and you know what we should finish well,
I don't know if it will be the last one,
but we should totally do one on private prisons. Um.
(34:37):
We touched on that a little bit in Prisons, but
that deserves its own show. That's sort of one of
his big um things. He's Uh, I guess what you'd
call it a passion project now is trying to and
he's super smart guy. Like hearing an interview with him
is really really interesting. But uh, yeah, it's kind of
one of the things he's dedicating us work two now
(34:58):
is exposing these for profit prisons and incarceration as an
industry in the United States. He just testified in front
of Congress recently, right, so it wouldn't surprise me. Um,
should we talk about the Angola three case a little bit? Yes? Please?
So our house Stuff Works article starts with an intro
(35:19):
about a man named Albert Wood Fox and he was
one of the infamous Angola Three from Angola, Louisiana State Prison,
which is known as the bloodiest prison in the South. Uh.
And originally these three men, Albert wood Fox, Herman Wallace,
and Robert King were sent to prison for armed robbery
(35:40):
and once they got in there, they started a Black
Panther chapter within prison and tried to expose some of
the atrocities going on in prison, how they retreated what
was going on with the guards. And that was not
a popular move to say the least, So, uh, they
(36:00):
did things like hunger strikes, work strikes started to get
a lot of attention in the nineteen seventies calling for
an investigations and so and Gola said, you guys are
going in solitary UM forever. Yeah, apparently that's that's something
that is commonly used for as well as to squash
dissent or criticism of the prison system or the prison rules. Yeah,
(36:23):
that's pretty awful. It is so UM Albert wood Fox,
who was kind of the focus of this article that
I read, he was in prison, UH in solitary for
forty five years, and they're not positive, but they think
that he is the person who was in solitary confinement
(36:44):
the longest in the United States forty five years. Dude.
I know, the fact that he's out and walking talking
is pretty insane. There's another one of his um, his
buddies or at least fellow inmates, UH is still in
in lockdown UM in Angola and has been since I
(37:07):
think the eighties, right, Yeah, I don't This wasn't one
of the Angola three, but it was a guy named
George Gibson and he is an Angola. Yeah, he's been
in lockdown since. And these are six by I mean
not like eight by ten is big, but these were
six by nine ft cells. And UM, here's the thing
they were. You know, if you look at the evidence,
(37:30):
there's a lot of documentaries and um, I mean, you know,
very famous cases. They were essentially put in lockdown to
squash this descent. But what they were officially put in
for was for killing a prison guard. Um. But according
to most people, that did not happen. It was not them. Uh.
There were so many inconsistencies or obfuscations. There were missteps.
(37:53):
There was a bloody print at the murder scene that
didn't match any of these guys. Uh. They never compare
that bloody handprint too or was it a handprint or
a footprint I had to print? They never compared that
to any of the other prisoners and that were had
access to potentially kill this guard. And there were very
(38:15):
few people that even could have done this. It's not
like it was the whole prison population. Uh. There was
DNA evidence that could have freed them that was conveniently
lost by prison officials. Uh. They had plenty of alibi
witnesses that had nothing to gain, Like they didn't get
an exchange, uh for for anything like good behavior to
get more free time. They said, these guys weren't anywhere
(38:37):
near the murder scene at the time. These other prisoners
and their main witness, Hezekiah Brown Uh. Basically in retrospect,
everyone says, this guy lied under oath so he could
get more privileges. He was a serial rapist serving life,
and he agreed to testify an exchange for more cigarettes,
(38:58):
birthday cakes TV time and the birthday cakes was kind
of interesting. Bert Uh and the warden later on when
he was reminiscing in this documentary, the warden of the
prison said, Hezekiah was one of these guys where you
could put words in his mouth, and so they were
essentially enough doubt to where the family members of the
(39:19):
guard that was killed said, we don't think these guys
did it, and we want to find out who did it.
And eventually they were. They were all freed for different reasons.
One of them, Herman, was freed because despite all this
misconduct in the investigation, in the trial Uh and constitutional
(39:40):
violations and racism, he was eventually freed because they excluded
women um from one of his trials, which is a
violation of the fourteenth Amendment, which was interesting. And he
died three days after he got out of cancer I know,
very tragic. Uh. Albert was finally released h um, but
(40:00):
not because of uh, I'm sorry. Albert was was not
released because of continued practicing of black pantherism. They called it.
That's not even a real thing. You can't make that up.
You can't keep somebody in there for that. What. Yeah.
And then finally in two sixteen, after forty three years
(40:22):
and ten months I think we said forty five years, um,
Albert was released, uh from isolation and from prison, which
is I'm sure there's a movie in the works about
these guys. But again, there was no transition process, right.
He was just in solitary confined one day and then
the next day he's out of prison, not just out
of solitary, out of prison. And from what I've from
(40:44):
from what the research I've run across, it's if you
were in solitary, you are more likely to commit a crime,
You are less able to identify with other people. And
if the point of prison is to rehabilitate people, or
at the very least to um not release them until
they're they're ready to be rejoint society, yeah, then solitary
(41:07):
confinement is the antithesis of that. You're stripping someone of
their humanity and their ability to relate to humanity on
a physiological neurological level. So it runs contrary to our
ideas of prisons. Yeah. And if you're thinking, what about
the Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual punishment, that seems like
(41:28):
and many cases like an open and shut kind of thing.
But um, there's never been a ruling on that. Now
the courts said not today, and in the mood today,
here's some other day, because after all, who cares about
the inmates, right? Their inmates, their criminals. Uh. If you
(41:49):
want to know more about inmates and criminals and solitary confinement,
you can type those words in the search part how
stuff works dot com. Since I said search parts, time
for listener mail. All right, a quick correction first. Um,
it's called World Geography with Josh Part two. I get
(42:12):
a wrong a lot. Uh just sit there and check
out maps. Well, I'm the worst world geography, but you
love maps. I do love maps, which is weird. I think.
I just I don't talk about it because I know
I'm not any good at it. Uh So in our
famine episode, I think you said, what were the two
countries Botswana and Ethiopia. Yeah, we're neighbor, they're not a
(42:36):
few thousand miles apart. A couple of thousand, not a
few thousand, all right, So we like the correct things
we get wrong. Um. And another thing we got wrong
in Jess was, um, when we did our listener mail
from Australia with the Assie lingo. Yeah, surely the Australians
got that we were joking, right, I don't think so.
(42:57):
We got a lot of response saying guys, you got
it so wrong. Yeah, they like kind of exasperated, like,
how did you how did you get it this wrong?
We were just kidding around. Yeah, we knew we were
wrong on that stuff. Where is that famous Australian sense
of humor? But um, I'm gonna read this one from
Matt just because it's the first one that came up
(43:18):
on my phone because it didn't have one prepared. You're
like the Assassin and no Country for Old Minton. It's
all about fake What a great movie. Um. So officially,
Matt says Marca's is McDonald's. Didn't know that. That's not true.
He said it rhymes with packers, Green Bay packers, so macers,
(43:39):
I guess bottle. Oh is where you buy alcohol. That's wrong? Uh, servo, chuck,
You got it right. It was a petrol station. Okay,
maybe that one. Dirries or cigarettes round to the curries,
also called darts or cancer sticks. Wrong, Piste is drunk,
we know that. I don't know what you said in jest.
(44:00):
Thought your bit was really funny. It wasn't that funny.
I wasn't very happy with myself. It could have been
way funnier. I thought it was good. Um. Although he
says Piste is drunk enough to not drive, I don't
know what that means in Australia. I know where that
line is because you veer off the road. You're just
in the outback. As long as you have some water
and you're drunk, you're fine. A stubby is a beer.
(44:21):
It's specifically a three hundred and seventy five millilite a
bottle of beer. Three pint. It's a pint, okay, Why
why don't you just call it a pint? He said.
It's also a style of Tradesmen work shorts with a
pocket big enough to hold a bottle of beer. We
call those cargo shorts or beer shorts. Um. A slab
(44:42):
is a case of beer, which is twenty four of stubbies. Okay,
um v B plus stubbies means from Victoria, like me,
Victoria bitter beer is a vb um Foster's also it's
probably Victorian from the Carlton United Breweries Carlton as his
(45:02):
Melbourne brewery. Uh. In fact, the first ever artificial ice
created was to make beer cold in Australia. What interesting?
And he says, by the way, there's a lot of
Aussie slang that is not relevant travel books. I read
them myself and laugh as nobody in Australia talks that way.
It's a big fat joke that every Aussie can convince
(45:25):
his foreigners. Danger is girt, g u r t ste.
You're clear of girt, drop bears, hoop snakes and yawi's
I didn't even know what's going on now. I think
a hoop snake if that's another name for hookworm. Okay,
what's a drop bear? The drop bear is the it's
your fecal material containing hookworm eggs. And yeah, he's that's
(45:49):
what you say when you drop a hoop bear for
getting a famous hoop slanging fight. Boy, I could see
how this could be an endless cycle of emails forever
and ever, let's keep it going kind of like a
hookworm life cycle. Uh. The above written is true today,
as your contributor wrote, no trademarks involves as far as
I know, Stubby work shorts origin might be contested. And
(46:13):
that is from Matt. Thanks Matt. What does Matt mean
in Australia? How you like your feet before you enter
a dwelling? Okay, thanks Matt. If you want to get
in touch of this, like Matt did, you can tweet
to us at s Y s K podcast. I'm also
at josh um Clark check me out. You can hang
on with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant
(46:35):
and at Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an emails to Stuff podcast at house stuffworks dot com
and has always joined us at home on the web.
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics, does it how Stuff Works
dot com. M
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