The End of Solitary Confinement?

Christ of Maryknoll -- Robert Lenz

I have been reading, intermittently I'll admit, a fascinating book on silence by Jane Brox called Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives. She spends a fair amount of time in the early going describing the development in the 19th century of the "penitential" model for prisons which was meant to offer an alternative to the chaotic gaols which existed in Europe and the New World which were hell on earth. The first such prison, conceived by an American Quaker reformer, Benjamin Rush, was designed to usher prisoners into a environment of almost complete silence and isolation during their entire sentences with the desired effect of leading them to deep reflection and contrition.

As I've written before, this sort of isolation and solitary confinement has been shown to be destructive and leading to mental health breakdowns for inmates which can be irreparable and even fatal. We hear about this in the news but I've also experienced it firsthand as a chaplain intern at Kingston Penitentiary in the late 1970's. My daily routine included visiting The Hole, the grim segregation unit in that institution which was inspired by the prison in Pennsylvania. These solitary confinement cells were part of the original prison and were terrible. I was witness to the anxiety and mental breakdown of men segregated in them, and I was often the only person to have an actual conversation with the inmates in the course of a day.


I was grateful to read that Senators passed Bill C-83, a bill to end solitary confinement, on Wednesday, complete with a package of amendments including adding judicial oversight to decisions about isolating prisoners, more supports for inmates with mental illnesses and community-based options for rehabilitating Indigenous people and members of other vulnerable populations. We'll see whether the federal government accepts the amendments which are supported by more than 100 legal experts across the country.

It's hard to describe how deeply affected I am by this ongoing discussion and the steps toward ending this kind of segregation in prisons. When we did the tour of KP last year we passed the dark entrance to The Hole and I had a visceral response which caught me off guard (no pun intended). It's so strange that what was meant to be an improvement to incarceration is now recognized as destructive and inhumane.

For Christ's sake, let's pray for the changes necessary for the benefit of those who are often already in the depths of despair.