26 Years of Solitary Confinement Is Torture
Tommy Silverstein isn't fighting to convince anyone that he's an innocent man who should be set free. He's admitted to the murder of two fellow inmates and a guard, and knows his sentence will keep him in prison until 2095 -- that is, if he lives to be well past 100. He did the crime, and he's doing the time. All he wants is a little human contact.
No, I'm not talking conjugal visits. Silverstein has spent more than the last two decades under a "no human contact" order, completely isolated from other inmates and given the silent treatment by the rare guards he does see. That's why he's suing the Bureau of Prisons under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of the use of cruel and unusual punishment.
The United States has used solitary confinement to attempt to mentally break down prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Waterboarding might be flashier, but American POWs insist that extended isolation is just as, well, torturous. Senator John McCain, himself a former POW subjected to torture, said in a New Yorker piece, "It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment." Human beings aren't made to survive without any social contact. The weight of separation destroys the mind, and I mean that literally -- studies have found that solitary confinement does the same damage to the brain as a serious head injury.
Since he's had a whole lot of alone time over the past quarter century, Silverstein began sketching as a distraction, and has captured the hearts and minds of many supporters with the anguish of his works. "At the end of the day," one of his pen pals said in a BBC article in 2001, "he is a human being. He is a victim of a system which brutalises people." Silverstein, an Aryan Brotherhood leader who was originally locked up for armed robbery, himself argues that he wasn't a killer when he first arrived in prison, but that incarceration turned him.
That opens up the larger question of how our prison system impacts the men and women housed in its walls, a system focused on revenge rather than rehabilitation, a system that exposes non-violent offenders to extremely high rates of violence and sexual assault (perpetrated by both fellow inmates and guards). What do you expect that to do to a person?
Regardless, Silverstein's focus is more narrow. He wants to see his fellow inmates, talk with them, walk in the prison yard with them. He is a murderer and he is a human being. We can lock him up for life and call it due punishment and protection for society. But a life of complete solitude has another name. And that's torture.
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