ANNALS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
HELLHOLE
The United States holds
tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this
torture?
Human beings are social creatures. We are social
not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious
sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way:
simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
Children provide the
clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well
into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give
children less attention and affection, in order to encourage
independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby
rhesus monkeys.
He happened upon the
findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his
primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of
importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys,
he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in
nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from
other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy,
disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also
profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long
periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.
At first, Harlow and his
graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They considered
factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they
used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow,
“Love at Goon Park,” one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys
clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were
missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them
an artificial one.
In the studies, one
artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire.
He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting.
The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became
deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on
it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only
“their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the
mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the
spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung
to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically
abnormal.
In a later study on the
effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test
monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into
a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and
rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused
to eat after release and died five days later.” After several weeks in the
company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted—but not those who had been
isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the
animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they
lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.
The research made Harlow
famous (and infamous, too—revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights
movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and
sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to
open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children
require nurturing human beings not just for food and protection but also for
the normal functioning of their brains.
We have been hesitant to
apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent
beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have
anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we
do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind
has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system.
And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.
Among our most benign experiments are those with
people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance
solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all
manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness.
Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the
“soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be
screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined
isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social
contact.
The problem of isolation
goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from
hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry
Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his
seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Anderson was the chief
Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985,
three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed
into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to
crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him
to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his
wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the names
of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or
press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another
building, and put him in what would be the first of a succession of cells
across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large
enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds
of other hostages. (One was William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief who was
kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around
his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling.
He received three unpalatable meals a day—usually a sandwich of bread and
cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He had a bottle to
urinate in and was allotted one five- to ten-minute trip each day to a rotting
bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise,
the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark
at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his
temple.
He missed people
terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and
depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself
disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his
confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always
thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the
poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery.
My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
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