Speaker 1: Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know
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Speaker 1: people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the
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Speaker 1: y pod. Still in nascent industry. A lot of people
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Speaker 1: who I see it? Thanksgiving once a year? Right, you
Speaker 1: should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what
Speaker 1: they are. Here's a cool show you should try, and
Speaker 1: here's how to get it. Yeah, and it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be our show, just any podcast you like in
Speaker 1: general that you think someone else would like, just share it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So get on board the dry pod train. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Speaker 1: Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is Stuff you
Speaker 1: should know. Crime and Punishment Party eight Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff on this And I thought we've
Speaker 1: got more coming. I kept keep saying we're done, but
Speaker 1: we're not done. Because while we touched on solitary confinement,
Speaker 1: in Our Prisons episode, which was a great one, was it.
Speaker 1: Have you gone back and listen recently. You're just making
Speaker 1: assumption now, I just remember it being a good one.
Speaker 1: It stands out. It's one of our good ones. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is um, you know, a little more robust. Look,
Speaker 1: it's solitary confinement and the ins and outs mostly outs,
Speaker 1: don't you think? Yes? And not just me. There's like
Speaker 1: a whole growing body of people who are kind of
Speaker 1: screaming their heads off. I guess, yeah, saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: put a person in a tiny room with no interaction
Speaker 1: or stimulation twenty three hours a day. Not good for
Speaker 1: you as a human right, And a lot of people
Speaker 1: are going so far as to say this, this constitutes
Speaker 1: cruel and in human punishment. Yeah, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: zukosis for humans. We talked about that in Our Zoo's episode. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, where the animal goes insane. Yeah. What
Speaker 1: it's not is Steve McQueen in The Great Escape throwing
Speaker 1: the baseball against the wall. Let's probably do that for
Speaker 1: like a half hour. No, they wouldn't give you a baseball.
Speaker 1: Oh that's true. You know, there's nothing funny you're cute
Speaker 1: about it right, um, all right, shall we Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: so solitary. It is a huge controversial thing right now
Speaker 1: because some a lot of proponents say it's extremely necessary
Speaker 1: and that this is just the way that you're supposed
Speaker 1: to punish people, or that it's just needed even without
Speaker 1: punishment or um. Other people say, no, this is cool
Speaker 1: and in human, like we said, regardless of how you
Speaker 1: slice it is actually an American product, it's an American export.
Speaker 1: It's being used all over the world right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And depending on where you are and what prison you're in,
Speaker 1: they might call it something else. They have a lot
Speaker 1: of I mean, in this article the house Stuff Works article,
Speaker 1: they you know, call it like lockdown, restrictive housing, segregation, isolation.
Speaker 1: But I saw a lot more uh creative names that
Speaker 1: prisons use that you know, try to shine it up
Speaker 1: a bit as something other than what it is. Right,
Speaker 1: But in what it is, no matter what you call
Speaker 1: it is, it's confining a prisoner to a relatively small
Speaker 1: cell um I saw usually eight by ten or less.
Speaker 1: And I also saw that frequently compared to a horse stable,
Speaker 1: in which comparison the um the prison cell actually comes
Speaker 1: out the smaller of the two and you confine that
Speaker 1: and this is the key you can find that person
Speaker 1: to that small selfer between twenty three and twenty four
Speaker 1: hours a day every day. Yeah, well I think twenty
Speaker 1: They like some people never leave. It depends on the day.
Speaker 1: So uh, in some cases you'll be confined like that
Speaker 1: for twenty three hours a day and then one hour
Speaker 1: a day you get out to exercise and um shower.
Speaker 1: But maybe that's just on week days. So a weekend
Speaker 1: you would be in there for forty eight straight hours
Speaker 1: or longer. If the guard doesn't like you or is
Speaker 1: in a bad mood, they might just not let you
Speaker 1: out that day, right, And we don't want to paint
Speaker 1: corrections officers, as you know, the movies do a good
Speaker 1: enough job of demonizing them. Yeah, And if you look
Speaker 1: into the some of the people who are being held
Speaker 1: in solitary, some of the people who started solitary or
Speaker 1: have stayed in their longest, you kind of understand why
Speaker 1: someone would want to keep them as far away from
Speaker 1: people as possible, you know. So, like it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's a complex issue. It's not cut and dried.
Speaker 1: There's not an obvious villain in this story, and an
Speaker 1: obvious victim in this story. Yeah, so, like I was saying, Um,
Speaker 1: we don't want to demonize them because it's happened enough
Speaker 1: in media and certainly films. Tom Hanks aside, I guess
Speaker 1: in The Green Mile, he just he can't help but
Speaker 1: be delightful. Uh, he played a well. He was actually
Speaker 1: kind of I was about to say Road to Perdition.
Speaker 1: He was the good guy. He was an anti hero though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: a bit of an anti hero. But uh, anyway, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna do that. But that does still happen, you know. There.
Speaker 1: That's why prison reform is still a thing, because there's
Speaker 1: still is a lot of abuse that happens in certain
Speaker 1: prisons and among certain prison guards and uh, correctional officers.
Speaker 1: So uh, it's certainly not something that's been solved. Uh.
Speaker 1: I just like to see away a little bit because
Speaker 1: I know that we have prison guards that listen to
Speaker 1: our show, and Chuck, we we should say the whole
Speaker 1: point of solitary is to limit human contact as much
Speaker 1: as possible. Yeah, so even though you are maybe interacting
Speaker 1: with a guard here there, it's when they slide your
Speaker 1: meal in three times a day, and that's it. You
Speaker 1: don't see people. You um, you exercise alone. Everything you're
Speaker 1: doing is alone. And that's the point. That's why they
Speaker 1: call it solitary confinement. It is uh. So there's a
Speaker 1: couple of types of segregation that can happen. One's called
Speaker 1: disciplinary segregation. That is uh pretty obvious you have done
Speaker 1: something that has run a foul of the prison rules um,
Speaker 1: which can range from legitimate things like you know, you
Speaker 1: start a fight, or you attacked another inmate or you
Speaker 1: know what, caught with an extra honey bun maybe so,
Speaker 1: or you you stole something um too a little more
Speaker 1: petty things and that's where that's where materia gets real hinky,
Speaker 1: Like maybe you talk back to a guard and they
Speaker 1: didn't like hearing that, so they're like, all right, you
Speaker 1: got to the hole for thirty days, right, Or maybe
Speaker 1: somebody um snitched on you and you were framed clearing
Speaker 1: clearing simple, right. So that's disciplinary segregation. There's also administrative segregation,
Speaker 1: and this is UM. You might be put in there
Speaker 1: if let's say you're a sex offender who notoriously have
Speaker 1: a rough time in prison, or you're a gang member
Speaker 1: who has started some trouble and you know Basically they're
Speaker 1: trying to protect uh supposedly trying to protect the prisoner
Speaker 1: from harm. Yeah, by isolating them from the population. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but whether they whether they want to stay in the
Speaker 1: regular population or not, that decisions made for them, right,
Speaker 1: And that's just one type of administrative Um. You can
Speaker 1: also be put in if the regular cells are full
Speaker 1: and they're just full up, so sorry, you gotta go
Speaker 1: to solitary. Uh, with overcrowding, that's obviously a big deal. Um,
Speaker 1: pre trial you can go in if you're not even
Speaker 1: convicted of a crime yet, this might be put in solitary.
Speaker 1: There should be a constitutional amendment that prevents that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read the story. Actually, I heard it on NPR
Speaker 1: this weekend, which is what made me think of this thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a documentary on Spike TV called the Calif Browder Story.
Speaker 1: Is that the kid who stole the backpack? Yeah? Did
Speaker 1: you hear that? No, I just knew about it while
Speaker 1: it was going on. Yeah, this this guy, Calif Browder um,
Speaker 1: when he was I think he was sixteen at the time, UM,
Speaker 1: stole a backpack from a party. He and his buddy
Speaker 1: get uh get I don't. I don't know if they're
Speaker 1: in a car, got pulled over, but they get arrested.
Speaker 1: They let the one guy go, but Calif Browder had
Speaker 1: a prior charge, so they kept him for more than
Speaker 1: three years in uh the Rikers Island Jail complex, and
Speaker 1: a lot of that was in solitary confinement, confinement, and
Speaker 1: this before like ultimately the charges were dropped. He wasn't
Speaker 1: even convicted of a crime, and he was in solitary
Speaker 1: for three years. He finally gets out. He committed suicide
Speaker 1: lessening year after. And it's just one of the geez
Speaker 1: one of the more egregious and sad examples of just
Speaker 1: how broken the system can be here in the United States.
Speaker 1: The the another UM way that it's being used that's
Speaker 1: just as egregious as pre trial UM in my opinion,
Speaker 1: is to house the mentally ill right after after the eighties,
Speaker 1: when Reagan closed down the massive institutions that had become
Speaker 1: like huge places of abuse of the mentally ill in
Speaker 1: favor of um more community servicing of mental health, but
Speaker 1: then didn't fund the communities, so that the mentally ill
Speaker 1: just ended up on the street. Right prison became the
Speaker 1: new institutions for housing mentally ill people well apparently a
Speaker 1: favorite place to actually house the mentally ill in prison
Speaker 1: is in solitary confinement. And as we'll see, UM, ostensibly
Speaker 1: just being put in solitary confinement if you have a
Speaker 1: completely healthy mind is really really bad for your mental state.
Speaker 1: If you're already mentally ill or predisposed of mental illness,
Speaker 1: it can be a death sentence for you. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: uh in the United States, UM, they don't have exact
Speaker 1: numbers because uh, it's just you know, states vary and
Speaker 1: what they consider confinement solitary confinement. UM. Not a lot
Speaker 1: of prisons want to participate in studies. There's no reporting,
Speaker 1: not very much, you know. UM, but I have the impression, Chuck,
Speaker 1: that you could be like a congress person saying like
Speaker 1: I want to tour your solitary wing and you would
Speaker 1: get turned out. There's like that level of um self
Speaker 1: administration by the Bureau of Corrections inside prisons. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the number very but UM basically most people say up
Speaker 1: to a hundred thousand inmates in the United States, And again,
Speaker 1: not all of these are in prison. Some of them
Speaker 1: are in jail, some of them or in uh uh
Speaker 1: immigrant temporary immigrant housing uh are kept in isolation. And Um,
Speaker 1: there isn't a You don't go before a court to
Speaker 1: get put in the whole you you know, a prison
Speaker 1: official will dictate this. There is no recourse for a prisoner.
Speaker 1: They call the shots. There's no oversight, can be indefinite.
Speaker 1: You can't call your attorney and say, hey, I'm in
Speaker 1: solitary and I didn't do anything. All that is talk back.
Speaker 1: I've been in here for six months because the guard
Speaker 1: has a problem with me. Um, there's nothing that can
Speaker 1: be done, basically no. So that makes it an extra
Speaker 1: judicial punishment with no oversight from judges or juries, which
Speaker 1: is that's that's not good. And it's really widespread, not
Speaker 1: just in the United States but around the world. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: well let's take a break and we'll come back and
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about how this all got started.
Speaker 1: Right after this, so Chuck I said earlier that this
Speaker 1: is an American invention, right, It's actually an American Quaker invention.
Speaker 1: The Friends Society of Friends came up with the idea
Speaker 1: of solitary confinement first, and I feel like we talked
Speaker 1: about this in the Prison episode two. The whole idea
Speaker 1: was that, Um, at the time, you know you might
Speaker 1: be put to to labor or work or um just
Speaker 1: left to hang around your fellow inmates in jail. And
Speaker 1: the idea behind solitary originally that the Quakers came up
Speaker 1: with was that you should be given time to reflect
Speaker 1: on your punishment and quiet solitude, and the hope was
Speaker 1: that eventually you would become penitent and be redeemed. And
Speaker 1: that's where the word penitentiary came from to describe prisons.
Speaker 1: That's right. This is the late eighteenth century when they
Speaker 1: came up with it at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: which sounds lovely. It does sound kind of like a
Speaker 1: nice place to be. I bet it wasn't. Uh. Flash
Speaker 1: forward a bit to the kind of early third of
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds and eighteen twenty nine Eastern State Penitentiary
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania. They said, you know what, we're gonna try
Speaker 1: experimenting with how we deal with prisoners, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: try this thing called lockdown. Uh. They found that it
Speaker 1: didn't work very well. These inmates were socially dysfunctional, a
Speaker 1: lot of them killed themselves, and so in eighteen twenty
Speaker 1: nine they abandoned it and said, this is not a
Speaker 1: good idea Yeah, within the first forty years of it
Speaker 1: being invented, they're like, no, we shouldn't be doing this
Speaker 1: to people. And they went in favor of the Auburn
Speaker 1: State Prison and Upstate New York's method of putting people
Speaker 1: the hard labor that became the the um the what
Speaker 1: you what you did when you got sent to prison,
Speaker 1: rather than put into solitary, and they kept solitary around
Speaker 1: like you didn't go away entirely, Like basically every prison
Speaker 1: had a hole. You get thrown in the hole, but
Speaker 1: you get thrown in the hole for like days or
Speaker 1: weeks or something like that to punish you for something
Speaker 1: you did in the prison. Yeah, and they still say,
Speaker 1: like experts still say it can be a useful tool
Speaker 1: in prison if you do put someone in there for
Speaker 1: three to five days or I think the u N
Speaker 1: says no more than two weeks, fifteen days, I think
Speaker 1: is what they came up with. Yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: the point is is not to say like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are tons of people that say you
Speaker 1: shouldn't do it at all, but experts say that it
Speaker 1: can be a deterrent for you know, poor behavior or
Speaker 1: whatever in prison. But people being in there for months
Speaker 1: and years is the issue at hand. So it was
Speaker 1: used sparingly, but it was still around throughout the most
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. Alcatraz famously had D Block, which
Speaker 1: was like a solitary block. Um. But then on October
Speaker 1: twenty everything changed in the current incarnation of the use
Speaker 1: of solitary confinement was born on that day at Marian Prison,
Speaker 1: Marian Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois. So there were two
Speaker 1: different incidents where prison guards were killed that day. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's not two separate things, right, yeah, And um, the
Speaker 1: the warden put the prison on lockdown and just kept
Speaker 1: it there. And what the warden basically invented in in
Speaker 1: retaliation for these two murders on this day was what's
Speaker 1: now known as a super max prison. It's where all
Speaker 1: of the prisoners are kept ultimately in isolation for twenty
Speaker 1: three to twenty four hours a day, uh, throughout the prison.
Speaker 1: And it's like a prison within a prison. Each inmate
Speaker 1: is in their own individual prison within the larger prison,
Speaker 1: and that's called super max prison. Yeah, and we talked
Speaker 1: about those a lot in the Prisons episode. These became
Speaker 1: uh uh not the new standard because you know, not
Speaker 1: all prisons of super max. But they became more widespread
Speaker 1: for sure through the nineties, um partially because of Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton in he signed the very famous crime Bill, which,
Speaker 1: among other things and it was famously known as the
Speaker 1: three strikes Bill. Well, yeah, that's what created the exploding
Speaker 1: prison population in large part. Yeah. And Clinton he still
Speaker 1: defends this as um going a long way to alleviate crime. Uh,
Speaker 1: even like during this most recent election he was being
Speaker 1: called out for it and and saying like this was,
Speaker 1: you know, a good thing, and um, the detractors still say, no,
Speaker 1: this is what started in a big, big way incarceration
Speaker 1: as as a business model in this country. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: apparently the US now has twent of the global prison
Speaker 1: population but only five percent of the global population as
Speaker 1: a whole. Yeah, that's really disproportionate. And apparently we're second
Speaker 1: at least on paper to the Seychelles um for the
Speaker 1: percentage of people in prison. Every seven hundred sixteen of
Speaker 1: every hundred thousand people in the US is in prison,
Speaker 1: and in the Seychells it's seven of every hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: But stay shells as a population of so that kind
Speaker 1: of excuse it. And they think that the largest prison
Speaker 1: state really is um North Korea that it has a
Speaker 1: larger port proportion of its population in prison the US.
Speaker 1: So technically the U s would be number three, but
Speaker 1: we would just be trailing North Korea. It's not something
Speaker 1: you want to trail. It's not not a country that
Speaker 1: you want to be super close to as far as
Speaker 1: like prison population percentages. No. Um. So, like we said before,
Speaker 1: there are even experts that say that solitary confinement can
Speaker 1: have a place in prison as a deterrent for bad behavior. UM.
Speaker 1: And like I mentioned earlier, two separate things here. Bad
Speaker 1: behavior is one, but you know, mentally ill, we just
Speaker 1: don't have enough space. Um. You know all these other
Speaker 1: reasons of the truly abhorrent ones. UM. But like I said,
Speaker 1: deterrent is a big one. UM. There there is a
Speaker 1: lot of legitimacy to protecting UM prisoners from fellow prisoners.
Speaker 1: They're at high risk for being injured or killed, that's
Speaker 1: legit obviously. If they're a danger, you know, have attacked
Speaker 1: guards or other inmates, then uh a need for separation,
Speaker 1: like you can make a case you know there for sure, Um,
Speaker 1: if they're prone to escape, yeah, maybe they need their
Speaker 1: own little room. I mean, that's that's one of the
Speaker 1: big ones that for for proponents of super max prisons
Speaker 1: that like this is it's a prison within a prison,
Speaker 1: and they have to get out of that first prison
Speaker 1: and then they're still in the other prison. It just
Speaker 1: just makes it much more difficult to get out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you escape and you go on and commit
Speaker 1: more crimes, murder someone while are on the lamb Uh.
Speaker 1: You can definitely make an argument that keeping people like that, um,
Speaker 1: these repeat offenders or repeat escape e offenders in solitary.
Speaker 1: So those are some of the arguments for Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then I I don't know if you said it already,
Speaker 1: but that having that extra way to punish someone who's
Speaker 1: already in prison is another reason proponents say you need
Speaker 1: to have this as a tool to kind of maintain order,
Speaker 1: like if you legitimately run a foul of rules or yeah,
Speaker 1: like yeah, exactly, because I mean, if you if you
Speaker 1: kill another inmates, sensibly you're going to go through trial again,
Speaker 1: but the you know that you could be executed for
Speaker 1: for that, and that would be different than just being
Speaker 1: in prison. But if you weren't, then that's basically like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're in prison for life. Already, Well we're gonna add
Speaker 1: another life sentence onto that, you know, Like, there's only
Speaker 1: so much you can do to someone who's in prison
Speaker 1: short of executing them. Uh, And the solid solitary confinement,
Speaker 1: proponents say provides that extra layer, right. And the reason
Speaker 1: it provides that extra deterrent though, is because of the
Speaker 1: impact it has been shown to have on the mind
Speaker 1: of inmates. And there's a few problems with this. Before
Speaker 1: we get into it, we should say there's they're very
Speaker 1: little studies. And one of the reasons why there there
Speaker 1: are so few studies is because there's so little access
Speaker 1: to prisoners in solitary confinement by researchers. It's just not allowed.
Speaker 1: They're just kept out. Yeah. I saw a lot of
Speaker 1: these studies were longitudinal studies about isolation of the elderly
Speaker 1: and like the effect it can have on them. Well,
Speaker 1: there's a big worry I've seen that that's like the
Speaker 1: next health crisis is going to be loneliness and disconnectedness. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that's where they've gotten a lot of
Speaker 1: the data because the the prisoners are unavailable for study
Speaker 1: there in solitary and in that same vein possibly disingenuously. Um.
Speaker 1: The ones that have been able to be interviewed say
Speaker 1: they've gotten out of prison and now they're available to
Speaker 1: be interviewed. Um. The proponents of um SO of solitary
Speaker 1: confinement say that the prisoners are just they're just telling
Speaker 1: researchers what they think they want to hear, or they're
Speaker 1: really playing up their story or whatever. But what they
Speaker 1: found is that there there seems to be a basis
Speaker 1: for the idea that there are demonstrably negative impacts on
Speaker 1: mental health that are possibly permanent and irreversible that comes
Speaker 1: from staying in solitary confinement for prolonged times. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there have been some studies. There was one on
Speaker 1: the Pelican Bay Prison in California, and it said, Uh,
Speaker 1: people in solitary for long periods, uh, suffer from depression, anxiety, apathy, hallucinations,
Speaker 1: panic attacks, paranoia. Um, this is a big one. Hypersensitivity
Speaker 1: external stimuli basically sound and light. Right. Uh. Sometimes they're
Speaker 1: kept in the dark. Sometimes the light never goes off,
Speaker 1: so they you know, have no sense of you know,
Speaker 1: no circadian rhythm of day or night, which makes sleep
Speaker 1: extraordinarily difficult to Apparently, prisoners who are in solitary will
Speaker 1: basically stay in bed all day and then they don't
Speaker 1: sleep much at night. But they're not really getting good
Speaker 1: sleep during the day either, So it's not like the
Speaker 1: circadian rhythm has flip flopped. It's been spread out over
Speaker 1: the day rather than um so which prevents it from
Speaker 1: getting actually real rest because they're constantly at rest. Uh.
Speaker 1: What else difficulties UM thinking, concentration, memory, UM, they become
Speaker 1: angry and violent, they could suffer from dizziness, UM, heart palpitations, perspiration.
Speaker 1: Basically like we're saying, zukosis, Like you're trapped in this
Speaker 1: little box and it's not like, well, you can just
Speaker 1: read all day and educate yourself or something, or paint well.
Speaker 1: And in cases where they are, yes, because a lot
Speaker 1: of times they're not given those things. But most time
Speaker 1: you're you're not allowed any form of stimulation or entertainment.
Speaker 1: So in in plenty of cases you are, like, you're
Speaker 1: still allowed to say books or something like that. But
Speaker 1: apparently one of the things you run into very quickly
Speaker 1: in solitary is you lose your taste for reading, even
Speaker 1: though that's all you have to do, because you can't
Speaker 1: remember what you read a few pages previously, so you're
Speaker 1: you're having so many problems with your memory that you're
Speaker 1: not able to retain enough of what you're reading to
Speaker 1: make a book worthwhile. So you just stopped reading after
Speaker 1: a while. Wow. Uh so where could this lead in
Speaker 1: a physical sense? Um? They have done studies and they
Speaker 1: show that if you're in solitary for extended periods, you
Speaker 1: have a higher rate of self mutilation and suicide. Um.
Speaker 1: They did one five year study from two thousand four
Speaker 1: in California, I think, in their whole prison system, and
Speaker 1: almost fifty of all inmate suicides were committed by those
Speaker 1: in isolation. And see, that's a tough thing for someone
Speaker 1: who who uh doesn't believe that that that isolation is
Speaker 1: a real problem. That's a that's a that's a tough
Speaker 1: one for them to just get rid of. Because the
Speaker 1: other stuff, you can say, well, that's all self reporting
Speaker 1: by a prisoner in solitary, So maybe they're just kind
Speaker 1: of making it up or playing it up if they're
Speaker 1: mutilating themselves. One guy mutilated his own genitalia, another person
Speaker 1: blinded himself. Um, and then you have all of these
Speaker 1: um completed or attempted suicides. Uh. Those are like hard
Speaker 1: numbers that you just can't ignore that. You would think
Speaker 1: people otherwise wouldn't do that if they weren't in solitary
Speaker 1: or else the solitary population wouldn't represent such a high
Speaker 1: proportion of suicides and attempted suicides in the prison, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've also done studies for post prison uh in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven at the University of Washington, they said prisoners
Speaker 1: released directly from supermax into the community committed crime sooner
Speaker 1: than prisoners who have been transferred, even if only for
Speaker 1: a few months before release to a general prison population. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw that too, And the I think the basis
Speaker 1: of that is that you don't have social support or
Speaker 1: social stimulation from other people, right, even if it's somebody
Speaker 1: you don't really like, if you're interacting with them, you're
Speaker 1: getting something from interacting with them, right. And one of
Speaker 1: the problems that you run into in solitary apparently is
Speaker 1: you start to focus on stuff. Very small things can
Speaker 1: become the basis of like raging anger and psychosis and um,
Speaker 1: because there's nobody there to tell you like, that's not
Speaker 1: that big of a deal, or man, just let it go.
Speaker 1: There's no one there to give you that social support,
Speaker 1: to to just let you talk off the ledge exactly,
Speaker 1: So the smallest thing can become something of immense important
Speaker 1: and if it, if it clicks with something like your rage,
Speaker 1: you're gonna space in the indefinite time you're in solitary
Speaker 1: thinking about that one thing and stewing, Like think about
Speaker 1: when you stew over something, right, and and just how
Speaker 1: it gets harder and harder to let go the more
Speaker 1: you stew You're just making that neural pathway stronger and
Speaker 1: stronger thinking about it. Imagine having nothing but that to
Speaker 1: think about for years. Apparently it's a really bad side
Speaker 1: effect of solitary, and that comes from not having that
Speaker 1: social interaction with people to say you're being weird. Well,
Speaker 1: and this is just me talking, but I imagine it
Speaker 1: doesn't increase your sense of empathy because you you gain
Speaker 1: empathy by interacting with people. So if you're released directly
Speaker 1: into the public at large etter being in super max,
Speaker 1: you just don't have that that normal day to day
Speaker 1: interaction with people, So you may be more likely to
Speaker 1: commit a crime because you don't care about other people.
Speaker 1: That would be It's it's a pretty reasonable explanation to me. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then you know, we'll take a break here in
Speaker 1: a second. But another a big impact is simply the
Speaker 1: financial burden that taxpayers pay it. And I went through
Speaker 1: this one uh uh paper academic paper on the cost,
Speaker 1: and it's really varies all over the place. But I'll
Speaker 1: just say one of the time, it costs a lot
Speaker 1: more money to house someone in solitary or super max
Speaker 1: than a regular prison population. I mean, I've seen it
Speaker 1: kind of all over the map. Our article says, uh
Speaker 1: fifty eight thousand dollars a year for a regular seventy
Speaker 1: eight grand per year. It's kind of all over the place,
Speaker 1: but those are pretty in line. It's it's always a
Speaker 1: lot more money. But I mean, how would you even
Speaker 1: keep track of that if if different prisons have different
Speaker 1: definitions for you know, solitary confinement. At the very least,
Speaker 1: we need to get this stuff standardized. This step one yeah, yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: all right, let's take our final break and uh we'll
Speaker 1: come back and talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. And um, shall we touch on
Speaker 1: the angle of three case? All right, so you said
Speaker 1: this is a American export, Um, it does happen all
Speaker 1: over the world, but there are countries, UH, specifically England
Speaker 1: and some other European countries that have UM kind of
Speaker 1: seen the light uh in a way of reform. UM.
Speaker 1: They rarely use it in England anymore. UH. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties they started kind of thinking about it and saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, maybe either thing to do is is
Speaker 1: incentivized are most dangerous prisoners, give them a little bit
Speaker 1: more control and give them incentives for good behavior rather
Speaker 1: than just the threat of punishment for bad behavior. And
Speaker 1: they found that it worked. Um. There was much less
Speaker 1: violence uh when they were housed in units of ten
Speaker 1: people rather than being in those individual cells where they
Speaker 1: could earn privileges like ah, more contact with other people,
Speaker 1: more phone calls, more visits. UH. They found it had UH.
Speaker 1: They said, the results have been impressive. The use of
Speaker 1: long term isolation in England is now negligible. So they
Speaker 1: found good results. UH. And then it just seems like
Speaker 1: more and more states UM are enacting things like uh
Speaker 1: like juveniles should never be in isolation. I think I
Speaker 1: should never be. Yeah New York did I think just
Speaker 1: in the last couple of years, even I think Obama
Speaker 1: abandoned in those two in federal prison as well mentally
Speaker 1: ill in the um. Yeah, juveniles can't be People under
Speaker 1: twenty one can't be kept in solitary because apparently, if
Speaker 1: it is having these pronounced effects on the brain, it
Speaker 1: would have even larger effects on the developing brain of
Speaker 1: a juvenile. Absolutely, so that that would be really bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the case I was talking about before with
Speaker 1: the the NPR story. That kid. I think he was
Speaker 1: sixteen at the time, seventeen when it started the incarceration,
Speaker 1: and he was still developing. He said. At the end
Speaker 1: he said he was twenty one, he felt like he
Speaker 1: was forty and then you know, like I said, he
Speaker 1: killed himself within a year after he got out. Really sad.
Speaker 1: And this is again, this is not some hard and criminal.
Speaker 1: He was never convicted of a crime. Right, he was
Speaker 1: in pre trial holding, right? Is that clear? Uh? Who
Speaker 1: else this? Juan mindez Um, he's a u N I've
Speaker 1: never heard of this title? Are un special? Yeah? Have
Speaker 1: you heard of that? It's fancy? Yeah, what is that?
Speaker 1: It's like a special investigator there, Like we we want
Speaker 1: to know about this, So we're gonna ask you to
Speaker 1: go out and find out everything you can and give
Speaker 1: us a report. I think it's a reporter in French,
Speaker 1: so you win. Uh. He presented a report in sixteen,
Speaker 1: just last year to the General Assembly that basically said,
Speaker 1: there's a trend towards reform all over the world when
Speaker 1: it comes to solitary and the writing is kind of
Speaker 1: on the wall that this is it's it's just making
Speaker 1: things worse. Yes. The thing is, though, is there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who still say, especially inside UM Bureaus
Speaker 1: of Corrections, that say, no, this is not you. You're
Speaker 1: all being played for fools. This is not a problem,
Speaker 1: and it's very useful. And there was actually a study
Speaker 1: UM by the Colorado Bureau of Corrections Department of Corrections,
Speaker 1: one of the two UM they they funded it or
Speaker 1: one of their researchers carried it out, and it found
Speaker 1: that UM that the mental health of inmates can actually
Speaker 1: improve in solitary confinement. And everyone was like, that isn't
Speaker 1: it's strange that this is the only study that has
Speaker 1: ever found anything like that. It's it was funded by
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado UM, and the methodology
Speaker 1: has been attacked as a very controversial study. But what
Speaker 1: gets me is that critics of the study have used
Speaker 1: the same criticism that critics of the UM studies that
Speaker 1: show solitary confinement is problematic used, which is they they
Speaker 1: said that the reason the prisoners were just telling the
Speaker 1: researchers what they think they wanted to hear, which is like,
Speaker 1: I'm doing great. I've actually thought about how how how
Speaker 1: bad my crime was, so you could probably let me
Speaker 1: out now, you know, so that that that study. I
Speaker 1: didn't read the study, but from what I understand, it's
Speaker 1: it's there's flaws to it, and it's the only one
Speaker 1: that came up with that. You think that if if
Speaker 1: the Bereau of Corrections had come up with something substantial,
Speaker 1: every state prison system would be running the same tests
Speaker 1: to find now and to back up their case. Right.
Speaker 1: You know who's really big on this is uh David Simon,
Speaker 1: the guy who created the wire. He is uh kind
Speaker 1: of and and you know what we should finish well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it will be the last one,
Speaker 1: but we should totally do one on private prisons. Um.
Speaker 1: We touched on that a little bit in Prisons, but
Speaker 1: that deserves its own show. That's sort of one of
Speaker 1: his big um things. He's Uh, I guess what you'd
Speaker 1: call it a passion project now is trying to and
Speaker 1: he's super smart guy. Like hearing an interview with him
Speaker 1: is really really interesting. But uh, yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: one of the things he's dedicating us work two now
Speaker 1: is exposing these for profit prisons and incarceration as an
Speaker 1: industry in the United States. He just testified in front
Speaker 1: of Congress recently, right, so it wouldn't surprise me. Um,
Speaker 1: should we talk about the Angola three case a little bit? Yes? Please?
Speaker 1: So our house Stuff Works article starts with an intro
Speaker 1: about a man named Albert Wood Fox and he was
Speaker 1: one of the infamous Angola Three from Angola, Louisiana State Prison,
Speaker 1: which is known as the bloodiest prison in the South. Uh.
Speaker 1: And originally these three men, Albert wood Fox, Herman Wallace,
Speaker 1: and Robert King were sent to prison for armed robbery
Speaker 1: and once they got in there, they started a Black
Speaker 1: Panther chapter within prison and tried to expose some of
Speaker 1: the atrocities going on in prison, how they retreated what
Speaker 1: was going on with the guards. And that was not
Speaker 1: a popular move to say the least, So, uh, they
Speaker 1: did things like hunger strikes, work strikes started to get
Speaker 1: a lot of attention in the nineteen seventies calling for
Speaker 1: an investigations and so and Gola said, you guys are
Speaker 1: going in solitary UM forever. Yeah, apparently that's that's something
Speaker 1: that is commonly used for as well as to squash
Speaker 1: dissent or criticism of the prison system or the prison rules. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty awful. It is so UM Albert wood Fox,
Speaker 1: who was kind of the focus of this article that
Speaker 1: I read, he was in prison, UH in solitary for
Speaker 1: forty five years, and they're not positive, but they think
Speaker 1: that he is the person who was in solitary confinement
Speaker 1: the longest in the United States forty five years. Dude.
Speaker 1: I know, the fact that he's out and walking talking
Speaker 1: is pretty insane. There's another one of his um, his
Speaker 1: buddies or at least fellow inmates, UH is still in
Speaker 1: in lockdown UM in Angola and has been since I
Speaker 1: think the eighties, right, Yeah, I don't This wasn't one
Speaker 1: of the Angola three, but it was a guy named
Speaker 1: George Gibson and he is an Angola. Yeah, he's been
Speaker 1: in lockdown since. And these are six by I mean
Speaker 1: not like eight by ten is big, but these were
Speaker 1: six by nine ft cells. And UM, here's the thing
Speaker 1: they were. You know, if you look at the evidence,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of documentaries and um, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: very famous cases. They were essentially put in lockdown to
Speaker 1: squash this descent. But what they were officially put in
Speaker 1: for was for killing a prison guard. Um. But according
Speaker 1: to most people, that did not happen. It was not them. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were so many inconsistencies or obfuscations. There were missteps.
Speaker 1: There was a bloody print at the murder scene that
Speaker 1: didn't match any of these guys. Uh. They never compare
Speaker 1: that bloody handprint too or was it a handprint or
Speaker 1: a footprint I had to print? They never compared that
Speaker 1: to any of the other prisoners and that were had
Speaker 1: access to potentially kill this guard. And there were very
Speaker 1: few people that even could have done this. It's not
Speaker 1: like it was the whole prison population. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: DNA evidence that could have freed them that was conveniently
Speaker 1: lost by prison officials. Uh. They had plenty of alibi
Speaker 1: witnesses that had nothing to gain, Like they didn't get
Speaker 1: an exchange, uh for for anything like good behavior to
Speaker 1: get more free time. They said, these guys weren't anywhere
Speaker 1: near the murder scene at the time. These other prisoners
Speaker 1: and their main witness, Hezekiah Brown Uh. Basically in retrospect,
Speaker 1: everyone says, this guy lied under oath so he could
Speaker 1: get more privileges. He was a serial rapist serving life,
Speaker 1: and he agreed to testify an exchange for more cigarettes,
Speaker 1: birthday cakes TV time and the birthday cakes was kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. Bert Uh and the warden later on when
Speaker 1: he was reminiscing in this documentary, the warden of the
Speaker 1: prison said, Hezekiah was one of these guys where you
Speaker 1: could put words in his mouth, and so they were
Speaker 1: essentially enough doubt to where the family members of the
Speaker 1: guard that was killed said, we don't think these guys
Speaker 1: did it, and we want to find out who did it.
Speaker 1: And eventually they were. They were all freed for different reasons.
Speaker 1: One of them, Herman, was freed because despite all this
Speaker 1: misconduct in the investigation, in the trial Uh and constitutional
Speaker 1: violations and racism, he was eventually freed because they excluded
Speaker 1: women um from one of his trials, which is a
Speaker 1: violation of the fourteenth Amendment, which was interesting. And he
Speaker 1: died three days after he got out of cancer I know,
Speaker 1: very tragic. Uh. Albert was finally released h um, but
Speaker 1: not because of uh, I'm sorry. Albert was was not
Speaker 1: released because of continued practicing of black pantherism. They called it.
Speaker 1: That's not even a real thing. You can't make that up.
Speaker 1: You can't keep somebody in there for that. What. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then finally in two sixteen, after forty three years
Speaker 1: and ten months I think we said forty five years, um,
Speaker 1: Albert was released, uh from isolation and from prison, which
Speaker 1: is I'm sure there's a movie in the works about
Speaker 1: these guys. But again, there was no transition process, right.
Speaker 1: He was just in solitary confined one day and then
Speaker 1: the next day he's out of prison, not just out
Speaker 1: of solitary, out of prison. And from what I've from
Speaker 1: from what the research I've run across, it's if you
Speaker 1: were in solitary, you are more likely to commit a crime,
Speaker 1: You are less able to identify with other people. And
Speaker 1: if the point of prison is to rehabilitate people, or
Speaker 1: at the very least to um not release them until
Speaker 1: they're they're ready to be rejoint society, yeah, then solitary
Speaker 1: confinement is the antithesis of that. You're stripping someone of
Speaker 1: their humanity and their ability to relate to humanity on
Speaker 1: a physiological neurological level. So it runs contrary to our
Speaker 1: ideas of prisons. Yeah. And if you're thinking, what about
Speaker 1: the Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual punishment, that seems like
Speaker 1: and many cases like an open and shut kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But um, there's never been a ruling on that. Now
Speaker 1: the courts said not today, and in the mood today,
Speaker 1: here's some other day, because after all, who cares about
Speaker 1: the inmates, right? Their inmates, their criminals. Uh. If you
Speaker 1: want to know more about inmates and criminals and solitary confinement,
Speaker 1: you can type those words in the search part how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Since I said search parts, time
Speaker 1: for listener mail. All right, a quick correction first. Um,
Speaker 1: it's called World Geography with Josh Part two. I get
Speaker 1: a wrong a lot. Uh just sit there and check
Speaker 1: out maps. Well, I'm the worst world geography, but you
Speaker 1: love maps. I do love maps, which is weird. I think.
Speaker 1: I just I don't talk about it because I know
Speaker 1: I'm not any good at it. Uh So in our
Speaker 1: famine episode, I think you said, what were the two
Speaker 1: countries Botswana and Ethiopia. Yeah, we're neighbor, they're not a
Speaker 1: few thousand miles apart. A couple of thousand, not a
Speaker 1: few thousand, all right, So we like the correct things
Speaker 1: we get wrong. Um. And another thing we got wrong
Speaker 1: in Jess was, um, when we did our listener mail
Speaker 1: from Australia with the Assie lingo. Yeah, surely the Australians
Speaker 1: got that we were joking, right, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of response saying guys, you got
Speaker 1: it so wrong. Yeah, they like kind of exasperated, like,
Speaker 1: how did you how did you get it this wrong?
Speaker 1: We were just kidding around. Yeah, we knew we were
Speaker 1: wrong on that stuff. Where is that famous Australian sense
Speaker 1: of humor? But um, I'm gonna read this one from
Speaker 1: Matt just because it's the first one that came up
Speaker 1: on my phone because it didn't have one prepared. You're
Speaker 1: like the Assassin and no Country for Old Minton. It's
Speaker 1: all about fake What a great movie. Um. So officially,
Speaker 1: Matt says Marca's is McDonald's. Didn't know that. That's not true.
Speaker 1: He said it rhymes with packers, Green Bay packers, so macers,
Speaker 1: I guess bottle. Oh is where you buy alcohol. That's wrong? Uh, servo, chuck,
Speaker 1: You got it right. It was a petrol station. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe that one. Dirries or cigarettes round to the curries,
Speaker 1: also called darts or cancer sticks. Wrong, Piste is drunk,
Speaker 1: we know that. I don't know what you said in jest.
Speaker 1: Thought your bit was really funny. It wasn't that funny.
Speaker 1: I wasn't very happy with myself. It could have been
Speaker 1: way funnier. I thought it was good. Um. Although he
Speaker 1: says Piste is drunk enough to not drive, I don't
Speaker 1: know what that means in Australia. I know where that
Speaker 1: line is because you veer off the road. You're just
Speaker 1: in the outback. As long as you have some water
Speaker 1: and you're drunk, you're fine. A stubby is a beer.
Speaker 1: It's specifically a three hundred and seventy five millilite a
Speaker 1: bottle of beer. Three pint. It's a pint, okay, Why
Speaker 1: why don't you just call it a pint? He said.
Speaker 1: It's also a style of Tradesmen work shorts with a
Speaker 1: pocket big enough to hold a bottle of beer. We
Speaker 1: call those cargo shorts or beer shorts. Um. A slab
Speaker 1: is a case of beer, which is twenty four of stubbies. Okay,
Speaker 1: um v B plus stubbies means from Victoria, like me,
Speaker 1: Victoria bitter beer is a vb um Foster's also it's
Speaker 1: probably Victorian from the Carlton United Breweries Carlton as his
Speaker 1: Melbourne brewery. Uh. In fact, the first ever artificial ice
Speaker 1: created was to make beer cold in Australia. What interesting?
Speaker 1: And he says, by the way, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: Aussie slang that is not relevant travel books. I read
Speaker 1: them myself and laugh as nobody in Australia talks that way.
Speaker 1: It's a big fat joke that every Aussie can convince
Speaker 1: his foreigners. Danger is girt, g u r t ste.
Speaker 1: You're clear of girt, drop bears, hoop snakes and yawi's
Speaker 1: I didn't even know what's going on now. I think
Speaker 1: a hoop snake if that's another name for hookworm. Okay,
Speaker 1: what's a drop bear? The drop bear is the it's
Speaker 1: your fecal material containing hookworm eggs. And yeah, he's that's
Speaker 1: what you say when you drop a hoop bear for
Speaker 1: getting a famous hoop slanging fight. Boy, I could see
Speaker 1: how this could be an endless cycle of emails forever
Speaker 1: and ever, let's keep it going kind of like a
Speaker 1: hookworm life cycle. Uh. The above written is true today,
Speaker 1: as your contributor wrote, no trademarks involves as far as
Speaker 1: I know, Stubby work shorts origin might be contested. And
Speaker 1: that is from Matt. Thanks Matt. What does Matt mean
Speaker 1: in Australia? How you like your feet before you enter
Speaker 1: a dwelling? Okay, thanks Matt. If you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch of this, like Matt did, you can tweet
Speaker 1: to us at s Y s K podcast. I'm also
Speaker 1: at josh um Clark check me out. You can hang
Speaker 1: on with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant
Speaker 1: and at Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
Speaker 1: an emails to Stuff podcast at house stuffworks dot com
Speaker 1: and has always joined us at home on the web.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, does it how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. M