John Oliver condemned the continued use of solitary confinement in American prisons on the latest episode of Last Week Tonight. The incarceration method, used any given day on 50,000 inmates in the US (almost definitely an undercount, given poor data collection), keeps people in a solitary cell that’s roughly 6ft by 9ft. “Which is way too small for a person to be stuck in for days, weeks, months or even years on end,” the HBO host said on Sunday evening.
In 2011, the UN declared solitary confinement to be a form of torture due to its physical toll and mental anguish, and called on all countries to abolish indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement in excess of 15 days. “Which really is not asking that much, but is also something that we in the US have, to put it mildly, not done,” Oliver explained, calling solitary confinement in the US “just appalling, as solitary really takes a toll on people”.
“Human beings are not meant to sit in a bathroom for 10 years with nothing to do,” he added. “You’re thinking retainers. Those are the things that we place in a bathroom and fully neglect for an entire decade, everybody knows that.”
Oliver briefly surveyed the history of solitary confinement, which was first developed by the Quakers – “if you gave me 50 guesses for which [religious group] invented locking people in a small room to feel guilty for 24 hours a day, I’d have guessed Catholics 50 times in a row,” he joked.
The Quakers assumed solitary reflection time with a Bible would lead to repentance and healing, but the psychological harms of the punishment were clear by the mid-1800s. In 1890, the supreme court declared that it made prisoners “violently insane”. The punishment was largely abandoned until the 1980s, when mass incarceration overcrowded prisons, increasing prison violence and leading prison officials to institute the practice as leverage.
Modern solitary confinement in the US, Oliver explained, entails being alone for 22-24 hours a day in a small cell with little to no contact with others, and minimal reading materials or access to radio or TV. Some cells are lit around the clock, or filled with continuous sounds of banging and moaning.
Unsurprisingly, such treatment results in lasting mental damage after just a few days, with even worse damage to children – “Oh yeah, in case I forgot to mention, we subject children to solitary in this country, too,” Oliver remarked.
Corrections officers have downplayed the distasteful reputation of solitary confinement via euphemisms such as “segregation”, “protective custody,”, “restricted housing units”, “security housing units” or “room restriction”.
In a recent TV interview, the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, tried to differentiate between “solitary confinement” and “punitive segregation” – which, according to the NYC board of corrections website, is the same thing as solitary confinement.
Oliver dismissed arguments by corrections officers that solitary confinement is a necessary tool to punish violators and preserve order. Researchers have found that violence is not the most common reason that people are sent to solitary confinement; a group in Oregon found that the most common cause was disobedience, such as not making one’s bed, using Facebook, or having too many envelopes.
“The truth is, petty rule infractions are a very common cause of landing people in solitary, and that is not at all,” said Oliver. People who are considered vulnerable in the general prison population, because they are young, mentally disabled, gay or transgender, have been put in solitary confinement for “their own protection”, which is “absurd” logic, he added. “It’s like arguing the only way to keep you hydrated is to waterboard you.”
And a 2016 justice department report found there was “little evidence” that “administrative segregation” had effects on overall levels of prison violence. “You don’t have to have been in solitary to understand that talking through your issues with other people is probably better for you than being locked up in a concrete toilet cave,” Oliver noted.
“The solution should be simple here: putting people in solitary is torture, so let’s stop doing it,” he added. “But exactly how we do that is absolutely critical to any reform actually working.” He cited efforts by North Dakota to shift from solitary confinement to a behavioral intervention unit with counselors and treatment, which has led to an overall decrease in prison violence over several years.
“I know that some corrections officials will still insist that they need solitary,” Oliver said, “but I would argue that if you find yourself making the case that you need to torture people to keep your facility safe, that in itself is an admission of catastrophic failure, and you may need to go.
“It is important to remember just how lasting the damage can be,” he continued, pointing to testimony from Anthony Graves, a former inmate kept in solitary for 18 years after being wrongfully convicted. As Graves put it: “Solitary confinement makes our criminal justice system criminal.”
“He’s right,” Oliver concluded. “Solitary isn’t something we do to people behind bars. It’s something we do to them forever. And it needs to be universally understood how utterly indefensible it is.”
