Secret Solitary

I will turn fifteen in prison years very shortly. All but about eleven months of those years have been spent in solitary confinement of one sort or another. Eleven of them passed on Texas’s Death Row, a hybrid administrative/punitive segregation regime that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and state legislators dreamed up for death-sentenced inmates. On February 22, 2018, mere minutes before my planned contact with the nihil, Governor Greg Abbott commuted my sentence to life.

Since then, I’ve been given a sort of all-expenses-paid grand tour of some of the state’s toughest segregation wings — from the Byrd Unit to Michael to Coffield, back to Michael, then to the Walls, Memorial, and now the McConnell Unit — during which time I have come to believe that Texas is making up a story about its efforts to reform its policies on solitary confinement. A story that relies on squishy numbers.

Until very recently, such quantitative legerdemain would not have been required. That there might be something morally troubling about locking a social creature up in a cell for years without any meaningful contact simply didn’t penetrate the provincial Weltanschauung of the contemporary administration. Every time Texas constructed one of its modern, 2,250-bed prisons in the 1980s and ’90s, it always included a 12 Building, composed of 504 solitary confinement cells divided into six pods — a prison within a prison, a world visible but unseen, designed for the state’s most incorrigible “super-predators.” Once they had these cells, it was only natural to fill them.

As is so often the case in the Yeehaw Republic, reality intruded from the coasts. I first began to hear that states were reducing the numbers of prisoners in segregation housing units in 2008. All of a sudden, or so it seemed, prison administrators from blue states began listening to myriad studies that showed conclusively that exposure to long-term isolation cells makes prisoners more dangerous, that it creates and worsens mental illness and engenders a sort of radical alterity that destroys the ability of these humans to relate to other people. In short: solitary confinement cells are recidivism generators, not tools for correction.

As states began reducing their solitary numbers, they noticed that the feared increase in penal violence never materialized. Once released, the vast majority of formerly isolated prisoners adjusted well to the normal, communal penal environment. So much for the super-predator theory. Like many other states in the South, Texas noticed these trends. Reducing its load of segregated prisoners interested certain fiscally minded members of the Texas legislature, as it costs far more to staff isolation wings than it does to secure offenders in the general-population environment.

So reduce them Texas did, over the objections of many wardens. Or so they say. According to the Demographic Highlights reports released in 2014, Texas had 6,564 prisoners in admin-seg, the widely accepted official designation for solitary confinement (although Texas has recently taken to calling the practice “Restrictive Housing,” given the negative connotations that have become attached to the older term). These numbers trended