Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Seventeen years ago and still the date, the time of day I arrived, and the exact location of the cell in solitary confinement are permanent fixtures in my memory.I was sixteen years old and being held in pretrial detention on carjacking and robbery charges.After spending three months in juvenile facilities, I had grown strangely familiar with being in a cell.But nothing prepares you for solitary confinement.I spent ten days in that cell.I learned to pace, seven steps back and forth, again and again.I stared at the wall, sought out figures in the cracks.Across from me was the padded room where they sent prisoners who threw things on the deputies.The kid in the cell beside me, he too only sixteen or seventeen years old, told me about all of his fears of a straightjacket.Those days felt like a straightjacket to me.Eight of those days were without a shower or any of the other small allowances that helped men from freezing in the night.I wore the same clothes and slept on a concrete slab that was covered in phlegm.For a time I told myself that the ordeal couldn't be real.I wondered if one of the punishments for guilt was solitary.How would I know otherwise?I hadn't been to court, hadn't seen my lawyer in a few weeks, had yet to have a trial-and yet, without explanation I was in solitary confinement.After those first ten days in solitary, I would go on to plead guilty to carjacking and robbery.Sentenced to eight years in prison, the better part of my youth was spent confined.And during those eight years, I spent a year and a half doing various short stints in solitary confinement.I watched grown men crack under the pressure of a solitary cell.I watched men beg for relief, strapped to a bed by their arms and legs.Seventeen years later, I find that I'm again constantly thinking about solitary confinement.The horror stories that drive the public conversation about solitary are not stories to me, but memories.It's unsettling because as much as I know the truth of what the noise of silence can do to a person's mind, I know the dangers for juveniles are worse.-Reginald Dwayne Betts, "I Was 16 and in Solitary Before I Ever Went to Trial" "It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones."-Nelson Mandela T he day I first sat down to draft this Introduction was the day that the city of Baltimore exploded.Most readers will need little background.On April 12, 2015, a 25-year-old African American man named Freddie Gray was stopped by police on the streets of Baltimore, forcibly taken into custody, and thrown, screaming in pain, into a police van.Within hours he arrived at University of Maryland R. Adams Crowley Shock
Source: Perspectives on Politics
Author: Jeffrey C. Isaac
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1864223370