The U.S. love affair with solitary confinement

Inside, The Valley Sings by Nathan Fagan & Natasza Cetner (Vimeo) is a fifteen-minute video of rotoscoped animations of prisoners and prisons, with a voiceover by multiple prisoners. They explain their lives inside. The first explains that he was sentenced to 34 years in prison at 16 years old. He lived in Angola prison in Louisiana. The film is also available on YouTube, as linked below.

Inside, The Valley Sings | Award-Winning Documentary Short Film by Short of the Week (YouTube)

Another “spent 22 years and 36 days total in solitary confinement.”.

Later, he said,

“When they came to take me out of the cell… My vocal cords had gotten so weak from so long not talking to anybody I was semi-catatonic. I didn’t have a mirror in that cell. I went in there in my thirties and I didn’t come out until I was 58. And when I saw myself, I cried. I had gotten old. I fought all those years to stay alive. For what? I would kill someone before I would put them in a cell like that. That would be so much more humane.

“With my words, if I’m able to enable you to feel something that I feel, then maybe you’ll know there’s real truth to what I say. This punishment does destroy: Minds, hearts and souls. It robs you of hope, which is the essential need to carry on with life.”

I am at a loss for words. The U.N. considers it a human-rights violation to keep anyone in solitary confinement for longer than two weeks. This duration is based on the scientific evidence of myriad sociological and psychological studies. Anything more causes irreparable harm.

This is what the U.S. of A. does to its own citizens. Imagine how little it cares for the lives of those who aren’t even U.S.-Americans.

Oh, wait. They don’t really care about U.S.-American lives either.

This is your tax dollars at work, running the world’s longest, most inhumane experiment, while simultaneously masquerading as beacon of hope and democracy, an ideal of the moral high ground.

At the end of the film it writes,

“Among Western industrialized nations, the United States is the only country to make extensive use of long-term solitary confinement.

“A recent report states there are more than 122,000 men, women and children being held in some form of solitary confinement in U.S prisons on any given day.”