When most Americans hear the familiar constitutional phrase "cruel and unusual punishment" they can tell you what it means, at least to them. Hanging. Flogging. Chopping a hand off. Chain gangs.
Putting juvenile offenders in solitary confinement is high on my list of "cruel and unusual punishment." What else do you call locking up fifteen, sixteen-year-olds, some even younger, in total isolation for 24 hours a day, in some cases for months at a time, never leaving their cells? "All an inmate's needs are met right here," was the way the warden of the adult county jail where I taught high school students proudly described it as he gave a group of professionals a tour of the new Special Housing Unit (SHU). It was true. Each cell had its own phone, shower, toilet, concrete bed, and adjacent small enclosed rec area. All an inmate's needs were met, except for the most essential: human contact of any kind.
These conditions are intolerable for anyone and are replicated nationally in our jails. The United Nations Human Rights Council reported that the U.S. has more inmates in solitary confinement than any other democratic nation. But locking up a kid in those conditions, a kid with more energy than a playground can hold; whose body at times practically vibrates with urges that many more advantaged teens struggle to control; whose emotional and intellectual development is at best undernourished, can only be called "cruel and unusual."
Human Rights Watch agrees. It's recently released "Against All Odds: Prison Conditions for Youth Offenders Serving Life Without Parole in the United States" documents the overuse of solitary confinement with minors and its devastating effects on them, effects heightened by the prospect of life without parole. The young people interviewed considered isolation a "profoundly difficult ordeal," leaving them with "thoughts of suicide, feelings of intense loneliness or depression."
But it's not just "lifers" in solitary who experience those "profound effects." I saw it when I visited my jailhouse students who were locked up in "the cage," as they called it. They were there because corrections deemed them a threat to "safety and security." In too many cases, however, that "threat" came from their acting-out behaviors due to untreated mental health issues or ADHD. Still others were seen as "pains in the ass" who "just needed to be taught a lesson."
It didn't take long for the new SHU to fall apart, the way everything else does in prison. Walls were scuffed and gouged from inmates being dragged in; cell door windows were smeared as guys jammed and angled their faces to see anything, anyone. The only thing shattering that intense sensory deprivation was the sound of inmates shouting to each other, howling through the thick walls, trying to connect with another human, announcing to the world, "I'm still alive." And when they weren't screaming, they were sleeping -- 15, 16 hours a day.
My students deteriorated as well. Once in isolation they abandoned any sense of civilized behavior. Young guys who would come to class shaven and showered, smelling of Old Spice deodorant, in fresh county oranges, now reeked of unwashed bodies; their hair dirty and matted, faces fuzzed; their eyes caked and puffy from sleep. I would bang on the window until they woke up and lifted their heads from under the pillows and blankets they burrowed under against the cold. They'd shuffle over to the door and we'd squat on our own sides of the concrete and glass wall and talk through the meal tray slot. It was then that I'd be hit by their sour, foul breath as though they were slowly decaying from the inside out.
Finally in 2009 the Department of Justice investigated these abuses. The DOJ reported that half of the inmates in the SHU were between 16 and 18, and that the average stay in isolation for juveniles was 365 days. As a result of these "extremely lengthy sentences," the mental health of these young people worsened significantly, aggravated "by the jail's failure" to provide routine treatment. Unfortunately, this is far from an isolated case. Abuses of minors in solitary are happening around the country.
I don't know how many people get the irony involved here, but I do know that the kids I taught did, even though they never "got" irony in class: We lock children up in inhuman conditions in order to teach them how to act human. Unfortunately, as studies have shown, inmates learn a far different lesson. When they leave isolation they are angrier, more distrustful, more cynical about ever getting justice, and more prone to violence. What could be a more "cruel and unusual punishment" then to confirm these young people's bedrock belief that America as it is now has no place for them other than behind bars?