Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
I Thought Solitary Confinement in Iran Was Bad -- Then I Went Inside America's Prisons
http://www.alternet.org/investigations/i-thought-solitary-confinement-iran-was-bad-then-i-went-inside-americas-prisonsIT'S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I've been inside a prison cell. Now I'm back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man's cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I'm taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can't get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I've ever inhabited. You can't pace in it.
Like in my dreams, I case the space for the means of staying sane. Is there a TV to watch, a book to read, a round object to toss? The pathetic artifacts of this inmate's life remind me of objects that were once everything to me: a stack of books, a handmade chessboard, a few scattered pieces of artwork taped to the concrete, a family photo, large manila envelopes full of letters. I know that these things are his world.
"So when you're in Iran and in solitary confinement," asks my guide, Lieutenant Chris Acosta, "was it different?" His tone makes clear that he believes an Iranian prison to be a bad place.
He's right about that. After being apprehended on the Iran-Iraq border, Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and I were held in Evin Prison's isolation ward for political prisoners. Sarah remained there for 13 months, Josh and I for 26 months. We were held incommunicado. We never knew when, or if, we would get out. We didn't go to trial for two years. When we did we had no way to speak to a lawyer and no means of contesting the charges against us, which included espionage. The alleged evidence the court held was "confidential."
36 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
EVERY DAY, I COME HOME to a new stack of letters from prisoners—our hostage story, it seems, is best known inside America's penitentiaries. For a while, I try to respond to each one, but as the weeks and months pass, they start to pile up. I become afraid of them and all the sorrow they contain. They take me back to my own time in solitary—and how can I go back there every day?
One morning, I sit down at my desk and look at the stack of envelopes slowly taking it over. I need to write these people back. I know what it's like to wait for word from the outside. Some of them remind me of myself while I was locked up, their whole lives bent on staying sane. They write. They read. They exercise. They meditate. Others make me think of what I would have eventually become. Their letters don't make sense. They write me constantly, desperately. They are broken.
Instead of digging into the pile, I place a stack of 18 postcards in front of me and write on each of them a question that has been on my mind since I left Pelican Bay: "Do you think prolonged SHU confinement is torture?" I send them to prisoners across the state and 14 write back, all with the same answer: "yes." One tells me he has developed a condition in which he bites down on his back teeth so hard he has loosened them. They write: "I am filled with the sensation of drowning each and every day." "I was housed next door to…guys who have eaten and drank their own body waste and who have thrown their own body waste in the cells that I and others were housed in. I cry."
There are plenty of studies about the psychosis-like symptoms that result from prolonged solitary. Indicators of what psychiatrist Stuart Grassian calls "SHU syndrome" include confusion and hallucination, overwhelming anxiety, the emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies, persecutory ideation, and sudden violent outbursts.
One morning, I sit down at my desk and look at the stack of envelopes slowly taking it over. I need to write these people back. I know what it's like to wait for word from the outside. Some of them remind me of myself while I was locked up, their whole lives bent on staying sane. They write. They read. They exercise. They meditate. Others make me think of what I would have eventually become. Their letters don't make sense. They write me constantly, desperately. They are broken.
Instead of digging into the pile, I place a stack of 18 postcards in front of me and write on each of them a question that has been on my mind since I left Pelican Bay: "Do you think prolonged SHU confinement is torture?" I send them to prisoners across the state and 14 write back, all with the same answer: "yes." One tells me he has developed a condition in which he bites down on his back teeth so hard he has loosened them. They write: "I am filled with the sensation of drowning each and every day." "I was housed next door to…guys who have eaten and drank their own body waste and who have thrown their own body waste in the cells that I and others were housed in. I cry."
There are plenty of studies about the psychosis-like symptoms that result from prolonged solitary. Indicators of what psychiatrist Stuart Grassian calls "SHU syndrome" include confusion and hallucination, overwhelming anxiety, the emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies, persecutory ideation, and sudden violent outbursts.
It's criminal that companies are profiting on locking citizens up & spending that profit on our legislators to create new laws to catch more 'criminals' so we can lock them up too.
