Solitary confinement

“ Upon the desolate spot, where fate had placed me, I conceived myself far more happy than many, who, for ignominious crimes, were doomed to drag out their lives in solitary confinement with conscience ever biting as a corrosive canker. ”

“ Solitary confinement is by many regarded as a mode of torture too cruel and unnatural for civilised countries to adopt. To one long pent up on a desert island the sight of a human footprint or a human form in the distance would be the most tumultuously exciting of experiences. ”

“ Shureef Deen, Khoja--ten years' hard--three months' solitary. He gave a faint sigh of relief. Solitary confinement, even when broken up by philanthropy into blocks of a week, gave time. It meant many ameliorations to a prisoner's lot which would be unsafe amid the ruck. Besides no man, he told himself, would be fool enough to risk losing these favours simply to spite another man.
He repeated this thought aloud that same evening, after lights were out, and the silence of solitary cells lay all over the gaol, save in one of the latter, where Shurruf sate whispering to Shureef. ”

“ Sustained then by my own personal experience and observation, I say fearlessly, that the solitary confinement plan, is an unwise, unfeeling, and ruinous innovation upon the Penitentiary discipline. Every body knows that it adds to the terror of such places; evinces a cruel recklessness of the feelings and personal comfort of the prisoner; and has the effect to convince him that the government is not his friend. This destroys his confidence in its mercy, and creates in him a disposition for revenge, which will eternally baffle all efforts for his reformation. ”

“ Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead. ”

“ Do you see, Bill, how your interests and mine and everybody else's are all tangled up and woven in with each other? Do you see how society, all of us together, produced Rockefeller, Thaw, and the one-legged man on the corner selling lead pencils? What would the world be without people? Solitary confinement is the cruelest punishment you can give a man—the chances are he will go crazy and try to kill himself when enough hours have passed during which he has heard no human voice and known no human touch. What does a singer or a poet or an actor amount to without listeners? ”

“ The shock of the trial, and the uprooting of a woman’s domestic ties, coupled with the additional mental strain of having to start her prison career in solitary confinement, is surely neither humane, nor merciful, nor wise. These months of solitary confinement leave an ineffaceable mark. It is during the first lonely months that the seeds [85] of bitterness and hardness of heart are sown, and it requires more than a passive resistance—nay, nothing short of an unfaltering faith and trust in an overruling Providence—to bring a prisoner safely through the ordeal. ”

“ His lofty understanding had comprehended that monomania, insanity, and madness were increased by confinement and abusive treatment; that, on the contrary, by allowing the patients to live together, a thousand distractions, a thousand incidents occurring at each moment, prevented them from being absorbed in a fixed idea, so much the more fatal as it is more concentrated by solitude and intimidation. Thus experience proves that solitary confinement is as fatal to lunatics as it is salutary to criminals ”

“ Allowing you to perfect yourself in your art, it wisely guards other people against the perhaps injurious influence of your productions, and in any case it completes logically, finishes, enforces, and makes clear the meaning of your solitary confinement. What does solitary confinement in our prison mean? ”

“ His duty was to keep political prisoners, men and women, in solitary confinement in such a way that half of them perished in 10 years’ time, some going out of their minds, some dying of consumption, some committing suicide by starving themselves to death, cutting their veins with bits of glass, hanging, or burning themselves to death. ”

“ The horror which makes it practically impossible in civilized countries to legalize punishment by solitary confinement and the nervous collapse which such confinement brings about are indications of how deep-seated is this desire. ”

“ We think that the punishment is barbarous, and that it does not sufficiently terrify. If this assertion is doubted, we will recall many proved facts of the deep horror expressed by hardened criminals for solitary confinement. Is it not known that some have committed murders in order to be condemned to death, preferring this punishment to a cell? What, then, would be their horror, when blindness, joined to solitary confinement, would deprive them of the hope of escape—a hope which he preserves, and which he sometimes realizes, even in a dungeon and loaded with irons. ”

“ One's nearest and dearest may have gone through dreadful suffering, may have been ill, may have died, meantime. One was given plenty of time to imagine all these things, for the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a narrow, dimly-lit cell, twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. ”

“ Solitary confinement is the saddest and cruellest punishment that can be inflicted by man on his fellow. The prisoner in the Bastille, when his reason reeled through prolonged silence and loneliness, was saved from mental collapse by the friendship of a rat ”

“ Mechanical adjustment to environment is always going on in the human being. Solitary confinement is a smothering process to which the mind must adapt itself, or perish. The mental demoralization remains after the confinement comes to an end, but the consciousness of that mental ruin, the consciousness of the suffering, has become dulled; from his closed cell the convict passes on to the ordinary prison life, actually unable to appreciate the extent of the misery he has undergone. ”

“ Of their last days on earth nothing will ever be known, but those of us blessed or cursed with the divine and cruel gift of imagination see in our mind's eye two men in prison-cells in solitary confinement, one a broken-hearted husband, the other the beloved son of a widowed mother. ”

“ Solitary confinement would have made me a permanent enemy of society.
There were no smiles and soap in that Military Prison, no scissors, no sanitation. There was nothing human or clean about it. Nothing but destruction will rid it of its vermin, or scour it of its taint of disease and death.
Perhaps the lack of scissors was the amenity of life whose absence I most deplored. Try to do without a cutting instrument for a month, and you will realise why it was that some sort of cutting edge was the first need of primitive man and remains a prime necessity to-day. ”

“ It is like nothing else in the world—it is impossible to describe it; no words can paint its miseries, nothing that I can say would give any idea of the horrors of solitary confinement—it maddens one even to think of it. No one who has not been through it can conceive the awful anguish one endures when shut up in a living tomb, thrown back upon yourself . ”

“ But the theory applies in its chief force to solitary confinement, where the sound of the human voice and the sight of his fellow-creature's face never intrude upon the tomblike silence of the dungeon; where complete inaction of the body feeds the despondency of the imagination dwelling on the one fixed idea of an interminable perspective of silence and solitude. ”

“ The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement. They see the long-buried prisoner disinterred, a maniac or an idiot!—how his senses left him—how his nerves, first inflamed, underwent nameless agony, and then sunk to palsy—is a subject too intricate for examination, too abstract for popular comprehension. ”

“ If, in the prison discipline of modern times, it has been found that solitary confinement is a punishment too dreadful for the most hardened convict to bear, and that, if persisted in, it is liable to lead to insanity, how much more quickly must that unfortunate condition have been induced when the trials of religious distress and the physical enfeeblement arising from rigorous fastings and incessant watchings were added? ”

“ When men were hung for horse or sheep stealing those offences were far more prevalent than they are now. Moreover, the nature of their coming punishment is too vaguely known to those who have never been in prison for the thought of solitary confinement to have any deterrent effect on ninety-nine out of a hundred first offenders. Indeed, that it is not sufficiently present to any man’s mind is shown by the fact that so humane a public as ours knows and thinks so little about the suffering of solitary confinement as to have allowed it to remain part of their prison system. ”

“ Solitary confinement, for example, I take to be one of the most cruel, and, generally speaking, one of the most unjust of all punishments; for it is incapable of being correctly measured, and it almost always renders the offender worse. ”

“ Solitary confinement, for instance, is an undoubted cure for the diseases engendered by bad example and evil communications; but it breeds a host of other diseases, peculiar to itself, and in many cases worse than those it cures. Not to speak of the indulgence which so much idleness allows for vicious thoughts and recollections, the chief objection to solitary confinement is, that, if continued for any length of time, it unfits a man wholly for subsequent intercourse with the world. ”

“ But these speculations were of course a part of his madness; for it is not to be supposed that a long course of solitary confinement could produce any dreadful change in the mind of a sane man; or surely no human justices or lawgivers would ever adjudge so terrible a punishment to any creature, human as themselves, and no more liable to error than themselves. ”

“ When he had done the captain said, "I have been told you meant to murder me, but I thought I might trust you." "God bless you, sir! you may," replied the regenerated man. Such is the power of faith in man!
The greatest advantage of solitary confinement is that it presents the best part of a prisoner's mind to be acted upon by his guardians; and the next is, that the prisoner is preserved from the evil influences of vicious companionship, of shame within the prison walls, and of degradation when [Pg 128] he comes out. ”

“ The prisoner in solitary confinement has his mind and faculties bound, fettered and tied, and by a law as fixed as that which keeps the stars in their places, the said prisoner's mind grows weaker, feebler, less sane, day by day. ”

“ When human beings have been long in solitary confinement, been abandoned, or otherwise have become isolated from their fellows, they have lost speech either partially or entirely, and required to have it renewed through gestures. ”

“ In view of the experience at home and abroad it is now proposed in France to place vagrants in solitary confinement. These vagrants are free-footed and irregular, devoted to the highway and an open-air life, and they are far less afraid of fatigue and hardship than of a steady and regular job. Advantage must be taken of their weak point by imposing solitary confinement; they must be subjected to what they most dread. ”

“ In such cases, there is nothing but death, which the most obdurate villain would not endure to be relieved from it, after a confinement generally of less than thirty days. In these cases, it is difficult to tell, whether the cold, the hunger, the pangs of a guilty conscience, the fear of death, the wretchedness of being subjected to revenge and malignity, is the greatest cause of suffering, and whether each of them is not equal to the pain of solitary confinement. Stripes, in comparison with solitary confinement, in such circumstances, are not severe. ”

“ Solitary confinement on a refined and cultured human being may produce a deep and lasting impression; a period of solitude, indeed, is for every intellectual person of immense value in helping him to know himself ”

“ We do not think that the two phrases import the same kind of punishment. Although solitary confinement may involve close confinement, a criminal could be kept in close confinement without being subjected to solitary confinement. ”

“ In the new Prison in Philadelphia, in which it is proposed to adopt this mode of punishment, and prevent evil communication by solitary confinement day and night, it has been said, by one of the Commissioners, that he should rather abandon the system, and adopt that of solitary confinement at night, and hard labor by day, than see the men confined in the cells day and night, without the means of grace. We may hope, therefore, if the experiment is again tried, it will not be done without adequate provision for moral and religious instruction. ”

“ It must be at once admitted that the system of isolation has produced no remarkable results. Solitary confinement has neither conquered nor appreciably diminished crime, even where it has been applied with extreme care, as in Belgium, and more recently in France, where it obtains strict and unbroken for long terms of years. Cloistered seclusion is an artificial condition quite at variance with human instincts and habits, and the treatment, long continued, has proved injurious to health, inducing mental breakdown. ”

“ So I constantly deteriorated in my lonely life--grew more savage, instead of more cultivated. Do you know what is the hardest punishment which can be inflicted upon criminals? Solitary confinement. It can be imposed for a short time only, because they go mad. ”