The lone­li­ness and iso­la­tion of quar­an­tine is noth­ing to laugh about, though we might have heard grim jokes about soli­tary con­fine­ment in the last few months. We’ve also seen over­wrought com­par­isons of social dis­tanc­ing to prison. These are, I think, release valves for real pain. One hopes the har­row­ing expe­ri­ence of the pan­dem­ic will give Amer­i­cans some com­pas­sion for the lives of pris­on­ers, a shock­ing num­ber of whom spend years, even decades, in soli­tary, most­ly deprived of nat­ur­al light, human con­tact, enter­tain­ment, edu­ca­tion, or a change of scenery. It seems, inar­guably, like a form of tor­ture.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, soli­tary con­fine­ment does real harm to the body and brain. Even inmates placed in soli­tary for a few days expe­ri­ence symp­toms of acute anx­i­ety and depres­sion. “Iso­lat­ed inmates often report symp­toms sim­i­lar to those of hyper­ten­sion, such as chron­ic headaches, trem­bling sweaty palms, extreme dizzi­ness and heart pal­pi­ta­tions,” Mary Mur­phy Cor­co­ran writes at NYU’s Applied Psy­chol­o­gy Opus. “Inmates in iso­la­tion may also have dif­fi­cul­ty sleep­ing, and some may expe­ri­ence insom­nia…. Con­se­quent­ly, inmates report feel­ings of chron­ic lethar­gy.” Over the years, this stress exacts its long-term toll.

In the Slate video at the top, for­mer inmate Five Mual­imm-Ak describes the five years he spent in soli­tary dur­ing a 12-year prison sen­tence. His account and those of oth­ers were recent­ly col­lect­ed in a book with the grim­ly evoca­tive title Hell is a Very Small Place. For­mer soli­tary inmate Ter­rence Slater describes a kind of fur­ther soli­tary of the mind: how impor­tant it is to lim­it the amount of time one thinks about loved ones dur­ing a 23-hour day alone in a cell, or “you’re going to lose your mind in there.” It’s esti­mat­ed that rough­ly 80,000 inmates in the U.S. are placed in such con­di­tions every year.

Giv­en enough time, one may lit­er­al­ly lose one’s mind, as Robert King dis­cov­ered. King was “con­fined in a 6x9-foot cell for almost 30 years,” Elana Blan­co-Suarez writes at Psy­chol­o­gy Today. “King knew that soli­tary con­fine­ment was chang­ing the way his brain worked. When he final­ly left his cell, he real­ized he had trou­ble rec­og­niz­ing faces and had to retrain his eyes to learn what a face was like.” He could no longer fol­low sim­ple direc­tions. “It was as if his brain had erased all those capa­bil­i­ties that were no longer nec­es­sary for sur­vival in a cell no big­ger than the back of a pick-up truck.”

Pro­longed peri­ods of sen­so­ry depri­va­tion can be espe­cial­ly inju­ri­ous for pris­on­ers who go into soli­tary with pre-exist­ing men­tal health issues, and “men­tal­ly impaired pris­on­ers are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly rep­re­sent­ed in soli­tary con­fine­ment,” Kirsten Weir notes at the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. One 2005 study found that the “preva­lence of men­tal ill­ness in admin­is­tra­tive seg­re­ga­tion” in Col­orado “was greater than 35 per­cent, com­pared with a men­tal ill­ness rate of less than 25 per­cent among the gen­er­al prison pop­u­la­tion.”

Clin­i­cal pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Jef­frey Met­zn­er argues that the “cor­rec­tion­al sys­tem has become our men­tal health care sys­tem for too many peo­ple,” using abu­sive, bar­bar­ic prac­tices that haven’t exist­ed in men­tal health wards for decades. The effects of soli­tary con­fine­ment sug­gest that “it doesn’t make facil­i­ties safer, doesn’t make our com­mu­ni­ties safer, and that peo­ple are devel­op­ing men­tal and phys­i­cal ail­ments because of this prac­tice.”

So says James Burns, a for­mer­ly incar­cer­at­ed film­mak­er who vol­un­tar­i­ly entered soli­tary con­fine­ment for 30 days in 2016 and livestreamed the whole expe­ri­ence. See his last four hours above and read at Vice about his rea­sons for sub­mit­ting him­self to hell—not a “dark dun­geon,” he writes, but “a very ster­ile, bright hell” which is, “more than any­thing… a mind fuck.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Pris­ons Around the U.S. Are Ban­ning and Restrict­ing Access to Books

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive

Art Class Instead Of Jail: New Pro­gram Lets Young Offend­ers Take Free Art Class­es Rather Than Spend Time in the Crim­i­nal Sys­tem

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.