In April, the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh was on the receiving end of a lot of well-deserved grief for a column about the coronavirus crisis in which she admitted, on the advice of a former prison inmate, to locking herself in a bathroom to simulate the feeling of solitary confinement. “About six minutes in, I started to panic,” she wrote.
It’s a cringeworthy line, for sure. Yet in its own clueless way, it anticipated some of the discussions we are having today about how the pandemic intersects with long-standing issues surrounding criminal justice reform and the carceral state. Crowded prison populations have been particularly vulnerable to the spread of Covid-19. As Justine van der Leun wrote for The New Republic in May, the disease took the life of an inmate, Darlene “Lulu” Benson-Seay, who likely shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Though some states have released prisoners in an attempt to ease the pressure, prison officials have had to make adjustments on their own. As NPR has reported, “Prisons across the country have placed prisoners on lockdown—they’re kept in their cells mostly around-the-clock—as a way to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” The use of solitary confinement has spiked, leading to concerns that this brutal, inhumane practice will become more entrenched, just as reformers were making progress in rolling back its use.
What is solitary confinement really like? This week, TNR published a first-person account by a prisoner named Arthur Longworth, who has done extended time in solitary confinement. Here is a sample:
You regiment your day. You create and continually reinvent a routine. And you stick to it. You pace the bounds of the cell: three and a half steps in one direction, three and a half steps back. You keep moving. When the cellblock floods and the cell floor is beneath several inches of water—which happens regularly because it’s one of the few forms of protest possible—you slog through it. When the floor isn’t covered with water, you break up your pacing with pushups and sit-ups.
You ration books. You get two a week—random paperbacks of a guard’s choosing.
Sometimes they’re complete. Other times, they’re not—a part is missing. You read a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter at a time. Whatever keeps you from running short of words before the next week. Books are passed out Sunday night—unless guards are busy with cell extractions or flooding, or they just don’t feel like passing books out. And of course, this happens often.
It is a tough read, no doubt. But it will give you a better sense of what’s happening all across this country than being in the bathroom for a few minutes.
—Ryu Spaeth, features editor |
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