I Thought Solitary Confinement in Iran Was Bad -- Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

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HOW DOES SOMEONE GET OUT of the SHU, then? Officially, there are two ways. One is to be declared an "inactive" gang member or associate, which doesn't happen very often. Just a few dozen inmates are released to the general population every year via that process—less than 1 percent of those serving indeterminate SHU terms. The earliest chance of being classified as "inactive" is six years from the latest evidenced gang activity. Then, if a gang investigator provides a single piece of new evidence—say a book found in the cell or a tidbit from a confidential informant—the inmate has to wait six more years.

The other way out is to debrief—to divulge everything an inmate knows about a gang, including names of members and associates. This he can do at any time. An average of 108 do it every year, even though among prisoners snitching can carry the death penalty.

And what if a prisoner in the SHU doesn't know anything? As former Pelican Bay Warden McGrath testified in court three years ago, anyone mistakenly validated "cannot debrief," because they have nothing to give. Catch-22.

In Pelican Bay's Transitional Programming Unit—the place where inmates go once they've been released from the SHU—I sit at a metal table with Paul Bocanegra, a burly, tattooed former prison gang member. He spent 12 years in isolation before he debriefed. Now, he is housed among other debriefers and will probably never go back to the general population. Assault or murder, he says, is "usually what happens once you turn your back on your buddies—people you used to run with. That's always in the back of your head. What's gonna happen if one day I get out, you know?"

CDCR claims that indeterminate SHU sentences are not meant to be punitive but are simply intended to isolate dangerous prisoners. That's also the argument the department uses to refute challenges like  the class action lawsuit under way by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Pelican Bay prisoners who have spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary. The suit claims that prolonged SHU confinement is cruel and unusual punishment.

Is it not? In the SHU, no work, drug treatment programs, or religious services are permitted. SHU prisoners are not allowed phone calls (except in approved emergencies) or contact visits. Clocks, photo albums, food condiments containing sugar (like ketchup), playing cards, and chessboards are all banned. Only after a nearly three-week-long hunger strike last year were SHU inmates allowed calendars, as well as handballs to use in the concrete dog run. Their monthly canteen draw is a quarter of the regular population's allowance, as is the one 30-pound package they can receive per year.  Pelican Bay Warden Greg Lewis insists this, too, isn't to punish them, but to provide "a very safe environment."

When I ask Bocanegra if the SHU is punishment, he laughs. "It's meant to break a person," he says. "You have to accept whether you want to die back there or you want to change." Leaving the SHU for a unit where he can exit his cell without cuffs and go to an outdoor exercise yard with a small group of other people, he says, made him "feel like you're free." When he walked out of the SHU, he saw his first tree in 12 years.
 

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?