“We Shouldn’t Torture People”: The Case Against Solitary Confinement

JM: I want to switch now to the personal side of things, because a huge part of this book is about just the testimony of lots and lots of people who have endured solitary confinement, including yourself. Why do you think it’s important that we hear these stories? And why did you feel it was important to tell your own history with solitary?

CB: We thought it was important to tell all these stories because solitary is different for everybody. Solitary is different for the queer community. Solitary is different for the Black and brown community. Solitary is different for people in the trans community, for women, for young people, for immigrants. We wanted to make sure not to speak for other people, but let them speak for themselves.

And then for me, it’s a no-brainer to share my story. I’m an open book—not because I want all my trauma spilled out into the world, because that’s not a comfortable thing, right? But if nobody’s telling our stories and nobody’s sharing the humanizing side of it, how do we get to a place where we can change these harmful practices and policies, which is impossible when we’re not humanizing people? I always use this term, when we humanize something, it becomes hard to demonize them.

So for me, to make sure another child at the age of 12 isn’t experiencing solitary confinement, stripped down to his boxers like I was forced to do, I’m going to tell my story, and I want others to tell their stories so that don’t have to happen.

JM: How many times have you been placed in solitary?

CB: I couldn’t tell you how many times. It’s so many. There were so many when I was younger, because I was so rebellious towards this system that I was raised to know that was not in my favor.

JM: There’s this place in the book where you list all of these different infractions that people have been thrown into solitary for. It’s a crazy list to read, because it’s so random. There are two different incidents where a guard didn’t like how someone was reacting to a football game, and so they got thrown in solitary.

How do you deal with that? Knowing that something like that could happen at any time?

CB: Well, that’s the thing. You don’t. You survive it. That’s why it’s so hard for us to get our young people to switch out of a life of crime and harm, because they’re living in what I like to call survival mode. I grew up in a neighborhood full of violence. When you live like that your entire life, when the police will abuse you, when people are shooting at each other, drugs are infesting your community, there’s abuse in your home, you’re constantly trying to just survive. You’re in poverty, you’re hungry. These things just pile up and you simply survive.

JM: Though there’s a lot of people who don’t survive it, whose lives are completely destroyed or ended.

CB: There’s always going to be casualties to this tragic experience. You are going to start to psychologically and mentally break down. You see that in the book, where one of the individuals had started to bite his fingers off. I had a friend who literally pulled his own teeth out. I had another friend who was so lonely, he started writing himself letters. Guys smear feces all over themselves and on the walls. Should they be in solitary? Or should they be receiving some kind of mental health treatment?

JM: You’ve turned your life around. You do all of this good work. You help people. I’m assuming that solitary confinement was not one of the things that actually made you do anything better.

CB: Yeah. It did an extreme amount of harm to me, stuff that I still work to process even today. The only reason I was able to turn my life around wasn’t [because of] the prison system and any of the structures that they put in place. It was the outside organizations that were coming into the prison that were solely committed to helping us change our lives. It wasn’t about punishment, it wasn’t about harm, it wasn’t about anything but helping us process trauma and understand how that trauma had allowed us to be put in situations where we would cause harm ourselves, because hurt people hurt people. Once you can address some of those things, then you can start to address things like accountability, remorsefulness, right? And that leads you to actually moving away from a life of harm.

But when you put someone in solitary confinement, it only disrupts and destroys. And we recognize that on every front, except for prisoners. We recognize this severe PTSD that comes with it. But then, when you say, well, wouldn’t that happen to prisoners or people in immigration detention centers, or children, or any of these other individuals that are forced to experience it, people immediately shift the subject, and they act like, well, because we caused harm, we’re, you know, in a situation where it’s okay to torture us.

JM: A lot of people probably would say, “I just don’t understand this. If it only makes things worse and it only makes everyone less safe, and it doesn’t help recidivism, why is it such a key tool in the prison system?”

CB: That’s why we wrote the book—to help people, even in our own movements, better understand people inside who are experiencing this, and get them to realize that our communities are actually in more danger by putting people through this. This continues to happen because we don’t challenge it enough. We just kind of accept it, and it becomes one of those things where we just let the prison system do what the prison system does. It’s like strip searches. There’s tons of studies that show that nothing is found in a strip search. But it’s a demonstration of power and control. People have to move out of the mindset of, “it’s just prisoners, it’s okay. They caused harm, so they deserve whatever they get.”

JM: Everyone has been consumed by this conversation we’re having about “political violence” in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Everyone’s condemning political violence and saying this isn’t who we are. But solitary confinement feels like a pretty blatant example of the use of political violence in a way that’s sanctioned by the state.

CB: We actually have people praising people for murdering somebody, which is a scary place for our society to be in. But it’s the same thing that we do to people inside, where we don’t think about, or care to think about, the harm that we’re causing, and we do it in the name of, well, that person caused harm, so that’s OK. People are doing that with Charlie Kirk, right? Like, he spread hate, so it’s OK to shoot him on a stage in front of everybody.

At the end of the day, we should want, when people cause harm, to reverse that and get them to not cause harm. Ninety percent of [incarcerated] people come back into the community from prison. How do we get them to come back better than when they went in?

I always use this analogy: If we took a broken computer and put it on the shelf in a warehouse for 10 years, and they pull it off in 10 years, put it back on the desk, and it doesn’t work, would we be surprised? We didn’t do anything right? But that’s all we do with people.

To take that same analogy, [with solitary it’s like you] start throwing rocks at the computer while it’s on the shelf, and then put it back on your desk.

JM: And you’re then blaming the computer, at the end of that, for not working, and using that against everybody else to come up with harsher punishment.

CB: Yeah. Think of the sentences that we have today in the world. We literally sentence people to numbers that are not physically possible. And we’re oblivious to that. Those numbers have become normalized. How have we gotten to the point where people get 250 years? It’s just for show. This mindset of retribution is our only answer.

You don’t see this happening in, you know, Germany, Norway, any of these European countries that have been around for thousands of years. They’re not doing that. So they must have figured that this is not a path towards the best way to structure our society. I don’t understand why we’re doing it.

JM: We’ve been talking about all of this very depressing stuff. Do you feel hopeful in any way about the potential to eliminate solitary confinement in the future?

CB: Yeah, I do think we can do that. I think if we can continue to do the narrative work, to humanize people inside, that we will be able to get people to do this.

I had a person I know who is very conservative. They attended one of our events recently, and by the end of it, they said they were crying and had a completely different thought about this. Because when you’re faced with it, it’s harder to participate in it. We are all participating in this. Make no mistake.

So for me, while this work is deeply traumatizing and stressful and hard to do, it’s a no-brainer that it has to be done. I feel like myself and so many other people are pressing hard because we have to see something change.

I always tell people, and I’m sure I didn’t coin this term, but I call it baton-passing work. We’re working on the backs of giants. All we’re doing is carrying that work forward, and hopefully we’re smart enough, like our elders were, to be training the next generation of people to do the exact same thing, because we might not ever see a result of the work in our lifetime. We’re just going to have to continue that fight.

And I do feel hopeful. I do feel like people are loving and empathetic and more caring than even they might want to believe.

JM: That friend of yours—that speaks to why a book like this matters, because so many people have no actual interaction with the prison system. They don’t know anyone who’s in jail or has been in jail. They don’t have a conception, really, of what it actually means from day to day to be living in these circumstances. Have you heard other stories like that?

CB: Oh, yeah, I see it all the time. There’s people I interact with, and then later on, they’re just like, you’re just not what I thought. There’s even times where they’re like, I think you’re the anomaly. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, I can introduce you to a few hundred more people, and that wouldn’t even scratch the surface. That’s why we need to expand more voices. We need to get more incarcerated voices into the fold, and we need to have more of their stories told, because that’s a harmful thing too: Well, this one person, look how great they are, they shouldn’t be in there, but we should still have a system. Because the system’s working.

No, no, it’s not working. And I’m not this one great person. I’m just one person doing work and being vulnerable and sharing my story. But there are tons of efforts. So that should be our goal: How do we tell more stories? How do we get more people involved?