In 2013, I met a woman who’d spent two years in solitary confinement. Her words rattled me. She told me, “You’re not going to get it. You think you get it, but you don’t, and it’s so much worse than you imagine.” I certainly didn’t get it — but I wanted to get it, or to come as close to getting it as possible.
Solitary confinement is used in prisons, jails and even immigration detention centers to keep the population in line. Without the threat of solitary to deter bad behavior, correctional officers say they are nervous they will lose control of a violent population. But its psychological effects are well-documented. People in solitary get paranoid, hypersensitive. They can have panic attacks, breaks with reality, suicidal thoughts.
[For more of this story, written by Annie Brown, go to https://medium.com/aj-story-be...s-story-25bc99e9d5fc]
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