Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened almost 200 years ago, is now one of Philadelphia’s major attractions, inviting tourists to reflect on what is assumed to be the historical obsolescence of its architecture and its prison regimes.
The pivotal innovation of this first penitentiary in the United States was solitary confinement, endorsed by religious leaders — including the pacifistic Quakers — as an alternative to the death penalty and other corporal punishments.
However, within the first few decades following Eastern State’s opening, this most dramatic exemplar of the penitentiary was subject to scathing criticisms, the most well-known of which was Charles Dickens’ description of solitary confinement there as “torture and agony.” After visiting Eastern State, he insisted that this “daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain” was “immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”
Given the consistent denunciations of solitary confinement from the very first years of the history of the U.S. prison system, we are led to wonder how and why such a cruel form of official punishment has survived into the 21st century.
One might ask the same question about the death penalty, which has been outlawed in every other major industrialized country. In 2011, Illinois led the way for a wave of death penalty abolition through legislative action and gubernatorial moratoriums. The Illinois legislature is now in a position to pass H.B. 3564, the Anthony Gay Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, which would forbid the Department of Corrections from holding an imprisoned person in isolation for more than 10 days within a period of six months.
Anthony Gay should be lifted up by progressive-minded people in the state of Illinois, and by people throughout the country and the world. His story of being sent to prison after being involved in a fight and accused of stealing a hat and one dollar led to his spending 22 years in solitary. We should applaud him for doing everything possible to resist the constant assaults on his humanity, including self-injury and the use of his bodily excretions to fight back. It is a miracle that he survived — and is now alive, free and passionately working to save those he left behind.
Gay is intimately familiar with what Dickens called “the daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain” and wants to protect the more than 80,000 people who suffer confinement in isolation in state and federal prisons alone. He warns us not to be misled by efforts to employ euphemisms such as “restrictive housing,” “segregation” and “adjustment center” — terms designed to deter the public from understanding how such carceral strategies attempt to break the minds and spirits of those forced to endure long periods of isolation and sensory deprivation.
Others — including Albert Woodfox and George Jackson— who have done time under such conditions have helped us understand the abolitionist implications of campaigns against solitary confinement, against what Nelson Mandela called “the most forbidding aspect of prison life.”
The Mandela Rules — formerly known as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners — were first adopted by the United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders in 1955. These rules define extended periods of carceral isolation as torture and restrict the use of solitary confinement in all but exceptional circumstances — and never for extended or indefinite periods.
The Illinois legislature now has the opportunity to follow Mandela’s leadership by passing H.B. 3564, sponsored by Sen. Robert Peters of Chicago, which will not only significantly restrict the use of solitary confinement, but will also serve as an inspiration to others in this country and elsewhere to take similar steps in the battle to aid those who are struggling behind walls to save their humanity, and thereby also to save our own.
Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
