Who is Singing the Prison's Elegy Alone──On Solitary Confinement in Prisons

Photo / Lin Wen-wei Ewam Lin

Recently, a prison guard made public to the media an alleged incident of prisoner abuse within a facility in an attempt to draw public attention and oversight. Consequently, the Agency of Corrections issued two demerits for "damaging the reputation of the correctional institution and improper speech and conduct." Our prison administration can truly be said to treat everyone equally: not only are the conditions for inmates harsh, but the guards responsible for guarding, correcting, and educating them will also find themselves serving time in a "literary Inquisition" custom-built for them by the prison should they cause the prison to lose face, making them the most gloomy guards in the truest sense.

The individual in the case described by this prison guard is an inmate with mild intellectual disability. Due to poor family financial conditions and without financial support from family, he traded sexual services with cellmates in exchange for daily necessities. The prison determined that he was at a high risk of being sexually assaulted and had an extremely high probability of suicide, so it shackled him and placed him in solitary confinement. For a very long time, due to the excessive duration of solitary confinement, the inmate's mental condition deteriorated day by day, and he even cried and begged the prison guards not to be kept in solitary confinement.

The actual practice of solitary confinement in Taiwan's prisons involves locking an inmate alone in a solitary cell, cutting off opportunities to see or talk to others. Exercise and visits are also conducted alone. Those in solitary confinement are even prohibited from working in the factory; unless there are special circumstances, inmates have simply no opportunity to contact other inmates. Prisons generally use solitary cells as one of the means to punish rule-breaking inmates and maintain prison order when inmates exhibit violent behavior, refuse to obey prison discipline, are at high risk of sexually assaulting or being sexually assaulted, have mental illnesses, cannot adapt to group life, or make false and abusive accusations against prison guards or others.

Outsiders harbor a misconception, imagining that solitary confinement allows inmates to "face the wall and contemplate their errors" during the process of isolation for deep self-reflection, while also avoiding being "corrupted" by other inmates. They even think inmates can "exclusively enjoy" cell space instead of squeezing into narrow communal cells with other inmates, leaving no incentive that should be prohibited.

In fact, solitary confinement is not a panacea for correction; its disadvantages often outweigh its advantages. Humans are social creatures. In a solitary cell, day in and day out, all alone, under conditions of long-term isolation, inmates lose contact with the outside world, lack stimulation, and fail to enhance their self-worth. Inmates will suffer severe psychological torture. Mildly, this leads to auditory and visual hallucinations, emotional dysregulation, or violent behavior; at worst, it deteriorates into major depression, self-harm, or suicide. What is even worse is that when inmates exhibit the aforementioned unstable conditions, the prison once again uses disobedience as a pretext to indefinitely extend the period of solitary confinement, often causing the situation to spiral out of control. These negative conditions arising from solitary confinement are heard of both domestically and internationally. They not only pose obstacles to prison security and correction, but also constitute inadequate care for the inmates' mental health, let alone expecting them to return to society with a sound mind after completing their sentence.

In this case, the inmate is a person with a mild intellectual disability. Individuals with intellectual disabilities may be unable to understand the consequences of their actions. Attempting to make them reflect on their behavior through solitary confinement is fundamentally ineffective. Furthermore, isolating them in a solitary cell may, in the understanding of someone with an intellectual disability, be tantamount to being abandoned, feeling akin to enduring extremely cruel torture. Moreover, the inmate in this case was placed in solitary confinement because the prison authorities worried he would be sexually assaulted, which is completely nonsensical in terms of logic and reasoning. If there is concern that an inmate might be sexually assaulted by others, he should be arranged to share a communal cell with cellmates who do not have same-sex sexual assault tendencies, and security discipline and life counseling should be strengthened, rather than placing an inmate who already has a mild intellectual disability into a solitary cell and letting his mind rot away within it. Such actions by the prison are purely for the convenience of security and discipline, completely disregarding the physical and mental health of the inmate.

A similar case occurred with Tseng Wen-chin, an inmate in a high-profile case. After entering the detention center, because he exhibited violent tendencies and refused to bathe, resulting in multiple physical conflicts with cellmates and guards, he was placed in solitary confinement. After being placed in solitary, his behavior still could not be improved; his violent behavior did not improve, and he even contracted a skin disease and was unable to care for himself, leading to skin ulceration, which was discovered by the judge after he appeared in court. The judge reminded and officially notified the prison that they should pay attention to his physical condition. Following the official document, the facility, in consultation with psychiatric and dermatological physicians, treated him, after which Tseng Wen-chin's condition stabilized and he began to observe order.

The psychological impact of solitary confinement on human beings is very similar to the condition of mental disorders. If an inmate who already has a mental disorder is placed in solitary confinement, it will only worsen the mental disorder condition. Providing proper psychological treatment is the only correct path to help inmates adapt to prison life.

If solitary confinement is truly necessary in certain circumstances, there should also be reasonable supporting measures. In current prison practice, only the head of the security division needs to make a decision to subject an inmate to indefinite solitary confinement. Solitary confinement greatly affects the rights and interests of inmates, yet in the absence of explicit statutory regulations, it is reduced to the arbitrary whim of administrative agencies and should be strictly regulated by legislation. First, careful assessments must be conducted for those intended to be subjected to solitary confinement, and there should be explicit statutory limits on the number of days in solitary. After solitary confinement is implemented, the prison should record the physical and mental condition of the inmate in a detailed and timely manner. In addition to enabling the solitary-confined individual to establish interpersonal connections with others in a timely manner, there must also be regular follow-up checks by doctors and psychologists to protect the physical and mental health of the inmate. The aforementioned records and inspection reports should all enable family members and the outside world to exercise timely oversight and be submitted to the competent authority for review; if there are any doubts, solitary confinement should be suspended immediately. In this case, this inmate has been in solitary confinement for as long as a year, has shown an increase in medication usage, and his emotions are no longer as cheerful as before. Solitary confinement should indeed be suspended immediately, and he should be transferred to a professional physician for diagnosis and treatment.

The purpose of establishing prisons is to enable inmates to repent and reform, making them suitable for social life. All actions taken by prisons toward inmates should be kept constantly in mind and operated centered around this. Inmates committed crimes in the past, and entering prison to take responsibility for their actions is a matter of course. However, even upon entering prison, the essence of the inmate as a "human being" cannot be denied thereby. If our prison administration consists of the endless exploitation and abuse of inmates, making them despair, distrust the system, fail to acquire a means of livelihood, and even experience worsening physical and mental conditions, how can we expect inmates, after leaving such a prison and returning to society, not to walk the old path and instead live out a better life than before? We sincerely hope that our prison system can transcend crime, prioritize education and correction, anticipate the future of inmates beforehand, and make them believe that hope truly exists.

※ This article was published in PNN PTS News Issues Center