Solitary confinement

Alexey Navalny

At the moment that I write this, the Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexey Navalny is in solitary confinement. That is, he has been placed in a small punishment cell, where he has to stay for fourteen days. He is allowed to take two books with him and to use the prison kiosk, albeit on a very limited budget. It is already for the fifth time since mid-August that Navalny has to undergo this kind of punishment. Here it is not the place to write why Navalny has been placed in solitary confinement, but I think that it is a good moment to write a blog about what being kept in isolation means to you.
What actually is solitary confinement? Let’s quote the Wikipedia: “Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which the inmate lives in a single cell with little or no meaningful contact with other people.” A prisoner can be isolated for different reasons, for example, as a result of a court decision; as a disciplinary sanction in the prison; in order to protect the prisoner; and so on. The essence is that the prisoner is deprived of any contact with other prisoners and has a minimal contact with the warders. The punishment can vary from having to spend the whole day in a prison cell, with the exception of doing exercises outdoors once a day, to complete sensory isolation, when the prisoner is placed in a pitch-dark cell in which no sound from the outside can be heard. The latter is the worst.
Especially complete sensory isolation has devastating consequences for the functioning of your brain. Most people will think that the brain works this way: Via the eyes, ears and other senses the brain makes a representation of the world describing how the world outside looks like. Research has shown, however, that it works not this way but about like this: There is already a kind of description of the world in the brain and via the eyes, ears and other senses the brain receives input about the present state of the world. The brain compares the input with the description present and if there is a difference the brain updates the description with the help of the input. However, the updating doesn’t simply stop, if there is no input from the senses. The brain is continuously in flux and is continuously reordering and revising the world description with the help of the information that is already there and with the help of its imagination. That’s what is happening when you are dreaming when you are asleep, but also – which is a more serious effect of sense deprivation – when you are hallucinating. Then you produce your own fantasies in your mind and in the end you can become mad. And just this happens (usually already very soon) when a prisoner is placed in an isolation cell without any light and sound: the prisoner becomes mad. What exactly happens is different from person to person. Some are going to daydream and have strange fantasies; some are also going to bang their heads against the wall. Your brain runs riot. It’s terrible (see David Eagleman The Brain. The Story of You, 53-58).
But also less extreme forms of isolation are not without consequences for your mental health, for there is also another factor that seriously affects your mental health, besides sense deprivation: deprivation of human contacts. Humans are social beings that need other humans to survive. Being provided with all you need to survive physically (food, fresh air, free space to exercise, and the like) is not enough. Also deprivation of human contacts, while otherwise living in the best physical conditions, will make you mentally ill. It can make you physically ill as well. The list of health problems you can get is very long and I’ll not mention them all, but here are some. Mentally, you can suffer from anxiety, stress, depression, paranoia, outbursts of violence, suicide, etc., etc. Physically you can suffer from chronic headaches, eyesight deterioration, dizziness, fatigue, laziness, sleep problems, muscle pain, etc., etc. Moreover, it is not unlikely that these problems will not stop once the isolation has ended. They can stay with the ex-prisoner for the rest of his or her life and maybe lead to a premature death.
Therefore, solitary confinement must be avoided as much as possible and be used only in extreme situations. That’s what, for example, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says: “Solitary confinement should only be imposed in exceptional circumstances, as a last resort and for the shortest possible time.” (source Wikipedia) Then one can think of isolating a prisoner or psychiatric patient for a few hours after an extreme outburst of violence at most. The United Nations considers in the so-called Mandela Rules solitary confinement lasting longer than fifteen consecutive days as torture. (source here) And I think that it is torture, indeed, certainly if it lasts more than a short time, depending on the kind of isolation (complete sense deprivation and forced staying alone in a cell with TV, radio and books available are quite a different, of course). And, that – torture – is what they do to Navalny, certainly in view of the fact that, as said, he is being isolated already for the fifth time since mid-August. But all this throws also a grim light on the forced isolations ordered by the authorities everywhere in the world in order to stop the Covid pandemic. Even though these isolations were or are in most cases by far not as extreme as the forced isolations in prisons by way of punishment, even in these cases already we see the negative health effects that human isolation can bring.

 Sources: see the links in the text, plus this article by Tiana Herring and this one in Medical News Today.