11 Prisoners Reveal How Solitary Confinement Literally Transforms You

Listen, nobody is saying people convicted of crimes in a court of law shouldn’t be punished for their crimes. Absolutely they should. Breaking the law must have consequences. But that doesn’t mean that inmates should be treated like animals. Or worse. And with such a massive prison population, America needs to have a conversation about how it treat inmates.

Should prisoners have to spend decades enduring the physical and mental anguish of solitary confinement? Should they have to wonder what they even look like anymore? Because it took a hunger strike for prisoners to earn the right to have their pictures taken. For 25 years, so much as a photograph they could send to their families was banned. Now, they get one photo a year. And what those photos reveal about life in solitary confinement is startling.

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1. Stephen Slevin spent 22 months in solitary confinement while his family searched for his whereabouts.

For the first few months of his confinement, Stephen wrote letters to the county jail’s nurse, whose reply amounted to an increase in his sedatives. He ended up with bed sores, a fungal skin infection, lost a third of his body weight, and he was forced to remove his own tooth when it developed an abscess. After his release when the charges against him were dropped due to his understandably reduced mental condition, he sued the county and won $15.5 million in damages.

2. Randall Ellis spent 30 years in isolation at Pelican Bay State Prison in California.

“Physically I’m much older. Mentally, I’m more thoughtful and distrusting of people,” he wrote.

3. Michael David Russell received a sentence of 25 years and 8 months for assault with a firearm and has spent most of the past 17 years in isolation.

After seeing the first photo of himself in more than a decade, he wrote that, “You think odd thoughts, scenes from a simpler, freer life…Then the changes both in a physical and mental way, I’ve grown older, then the weight of its reality breaks your heart and the quest for sanity forces you to your knees, an anguish echoes in your soul, ‘will I die here’?”

4. Convicted of murder in 1977, Lorenzo Benton has spent 27 years in isolation.

“The time in between these photographs, it was a time in which I aged dramatically,” he wrote, “Resulting in many people hardly remembering me. Now I am 57 years old, going bald on top, with a lot of gray hair on my head and face.”