Lonelinesss: A Modern Torture Device

Daniel Bethers DBethers@Dailyegyptian com

The concept of loneliness in modern times is often felt close to home, even in times of instantaneous connection. It’s a knot in your chest when you step into a silent room with no posters to look up to, and not a pigment of paint to color the walls. It’s a lack of personal effects, projects, or little games, the kind that gives you the feeling a person doesn’t have so much as a picture to put to frame. Solitude coils through the air like dust in an abandoned warehouse, and rests its heavy tendrils on your shoulders, nests in your hair, weaves itself in and out of each quiet moment until you feel the staccato shifting from second to second, thought to thought. Until you’ve lost even the rhythm of your own heart and can feel nothing but the time, abrasive, and ceaseless as it flows against your mind, with not another soul to tell you what is real. If too prolonged, solitude can be the death of, not only our mind, but the purpose of it: To relate, to compare, and to feel things. To see another person and know that you’re one too.

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Letters and guest columns must be submitted with author’s contact information, preferably via email. Phone numbers are required to verify authorship, but will not be published. Students must include their year and major. Faculty must include rank and department. Others include hometown. Submissions should be sent to editor@dailyegyptian.com them, to come up with imaginary friends to talk to. If there’s an insect in your cell you become very emotionally tied to anything else living because you’re so desperate for any kind of relational experience in you know, nightmares, hallucinations. extreme stress, and pacing. And really, like, people that I talked to and I myself became, you know, often just kind of risen, reduced to like a feeling of an animal in a cage; just desperate, pacing back and forth, desperate for any sign of life outside of the confines of that cell.” condemned the United States for it’s massive excess of prisoners in longterm solitary confinement.

However, the U.S. has declined to ratify the Convention Against Torture, as well as many other U.N. documents despite often sponsoring them. The U.S. often writes in clauses and conditions exempting itself, but, as an increasing number of studies have connected the practice to severe psychological damage, modern movements have begun to push officials to end the practice.

According to the famous philosopher Hegel, true consciousness is only achieved in the presence of another, so that both minds know that they are something more than the objects which so easily fool our minds, slipping in and out of our awareness from moment to moment. The mind is a muscle that withers just the same as a person’s limbs might in a tiny seven by ten foot cell, smaller than a parking lot space.

This is the world Sarah Shourd, a trauma-informed investigative journalist and longtime anit-solitary confinement activist, left at the end of her 410 day stay in solitary confinement at Iran’s Evin prison, where she was taken as a political prisoner, after her group was snatched from a tourist site near the Iran border with Northern Iraqi Kurdistan.

She was abducted just as Iran’s Green movement sprang up in response to the controversy of Iran’s 2009 presidential election, which kept the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power through results nearly universally believed to be fraudulent. This, combined with escalating nuclear tensions at the time caused the country to lash out like a cornered animal, finding Sarah Shourd, who was an anti-war journalist and ESL teacher at the The International School Of Choueifat, guilty of espionage.

In an interview with the Daily Egyptian on her recent visit to campus, Shroud said:

“The way that I adapted, and the tools that I developed to keep myself on track and keep myself from going over the edge of sanity are very similar to people that I’ve interviewed in this country. You know, a human being locked in a small cell has only you know, so many things to do. You start to talk to your body parts and name

Although Iran’s government could procure no evidence for its claims, Shourd was kept in complete isolation for 22-23 hours a day in a cell with a metal grate over the window. Her only interactions were with her interrogators, and occasionally with her fellow detainees. The right to visit the latter group, which included her then-finance Shane Bauer, only came after she went on a week-long hunger strike, which won her only a handful of minutes blindfolded in a padded cell with them. Eventually daily half hour visits were arranged in an open air cell, though Shourd was in such a powerless state that she could never be entirely sure they would continue to happen.

“We all need to feel belonging and connection: we are a social species. When we don’t feel belonging, when we feel hated and targeted and devalued, we have nothing to believe in and nothing to direct us. Some people will endure because they, at some point, have enough love, or a strong enough belief system can overcome that, but the vast majority of people decompensate [lose the ability to maintain normal psychological defenses] and turn on themselves. They become their own torturers. The suicide rate in solitary confinement is much higher than in general prison. People self-mutilate. People that go in with mental illness become more and more mentally ill until they are near catatonic.”

On Sept 14, 2010, the Iranian government released Shourd for a sum of $500,000 dollars, paid by the government of Oman. She could reasonably have thought herself free from the barbarous clutches of one of the West’s greatest villains - Iran, a rogue state responsible for funding a litany of terrorist groups and violently foisting its theocracy on democracyloving Iranians. What she discovered upon her return home was that, in the United States, the practice was standardized: used casually as a tool to separate inmates in U.S. prisons.

The United Nations’ Convention Against Torture defines torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” for information, punishment, intimidation, or for a reason based on discrimination. This includes solitary confinement, and the UN Committee Against Torture has repeatedly

“Solitary confinement as a practice was invented in the United States. It was invented by the Quakers at the Walnut Street jail, which later became the Eastern [State] penitentiary, which is now a museum in Philadelphia,” Shourd said. “They thought that leaving someone in isolation would help people find their inner relationship to God. But they quickly saw that the opposite happened; that people lost their minds and hurt themselves and decompensated. We’ve exported this model, so the conditions that I was in, in Evin prison in Tehran, for 410 days, are very similar to the conditions in this country. Except people are put in solitary in this country far longer. I mean, I was in for over a year. People here are in solitary for decades for petty offenses, an offense being speaking up for their rights or organizing in some way.”

According to a 2021 Yale Law School study, approximately 45,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the U.S. (a figure that includes juveniles). Solitary confinement being defined as isolation for 22 hours a day or more for a period for 15 days or more.

As recently as 2022, Alfred Woodfox, a survivor of 42 years in solitary confinement, died of Covid-19 related illness, only 5 years after a plea deal for his unsettled case allowed him to walk free again. Three separate indictments allowed his torment to continue for decades, due to evidence against him often proving unreliable in the case of his bank robbery and manslaughter charges. He was a member of the Black Panthers, having encountered them in a New York jail before he was transferred to his permanent cell at Louisiana State Penitentiary, or “Angola”, the name of the slave plantation the prison replaced.

“Some of them [people in solitary confinement] had connections to the Black Panther Party and more like leftist political movements, and were doing prison organizing, and that’s perceived as a threat to the control that prison administration has over incarcerated populations,” said Sara Vogel, an editor for Solitary Watch, a group of journalists and researchers (including Shourd) that scrutinize the use of solitary confinement in the justice system.