A man who is isolated and alone can be regarded as a sort of discarded person," Dinizulu, king of the Zulus, wrote in 1910. "There is nothing worse than being isolated." Prisoners who have endured solitary confinement agree. According to Senator John McCain, who was kept alone in a cell as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, "It crushes your spirit."
Others now in this situation have described the experience as a "horrible, caged feeling," or living "in a void of nothingness," as a study by the New York Civil Liberties Union last year found. Yet despite expert consensus that such extreme separation from others can yield effects akin to those of physical torture, it often is employed as a remedy of first, not last, resort. And it has been imposed for weeks, months or years — even decades — with little regulation or due process. Partly to protest the overuse of solitary (also known, among other names, as administrative segregation, "ad-seg" and "special housing"), California inmates mounted a 60-day hunger strike that ended on September 6 without any major concessions on the state's part but with the promise of legislative hearings on the problem.
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