THE YALE LAW JOURNAL FORUM
JANUARY 15, 2016
	

Only Once I Thought About Suicide
Reginald Dwayne Betts
i.
Every prison and jail in Virginia has a series of cells used for solitary
confinement. Fairfax County Jail had three units for solitary confinement.
None had windows. The R-Cells had ceilings so high that a tall man could not
reach them by jumping. The other had a door so thick and heavy that when it
closed no sounds escaped. The third looked like the cells for the general
population.
At Southampton Correctional Center, an entire building had been
converted to hold men in solitary. The cells looked just like those housing the
general population, except the doors only opened to take you to the shower
once every three days, or to the kennel-like cages where you periodically had an
hour to pace the fifteen steps back and forth, to do push-ups, jumping jacks, to
stare out the window into the open countryside that taunted you.
Some of the cells in solitary confinement at Red Onion State Prison faced
what people called the gutted side of a mountain. Three times a week guards
would shackle and cuff prisoners and escort them, under the watchful eye of a
guard holding a shotgun, to the showers.
Sussex 1 State Prison, like Southampton, had units initially constructed for
general population converted into solitary confinement units. Men could stare
from their cell into the yard and watch men going about the work of doing
time, the basketball games, the circling the yard, the fights. At Sussex, they also
held death row prisoners, and on occasion, while being walked to the shower,
you would glimpse a man preparing to die.
At Coffeewood Correctional Center, the solitary confinement unit had
about a dozen cells. The windows were so high up that a tall man would have
to leap to glimpse the green of the outside grass. Of all these prisons, only
Southampton’s units had windows wider than an open palm or taller than a
man’s arm.

222

only once i thought about suicide

ii.
In 1996, when I was sixteen, a fifteen-year-old friend and I carjacked a man
in Virginia. Shortly after being arrested, I confessed. Back then, I did not know
what it meant to be transferred to criminal court. But I would learn. Following
John DiLulio’s super-predator theory, state prosecutors began to rely
increasingly on statutory mechanisms that allowed them to transfer children
from juvenile to criminal court, where, if found guilty, they would be exposed
to the same punishments and same prisons as people eighteen or older.1 In
Virginia, carjacking carries a minimum sentence of fifteen years and a
maximum of life in prison.2 Five months after my crime, after pleading guilty
to carjacking and a weapons charge, I stood before the Honorable Judge Bach
to be sentenced. Before sentencing me to nine years, he said, “I am under no
illusion that sending you to prison will help, but you can get something out of
it if you want.” It should not have been a surprise to anyone that part of what I
got out of my time in prison was nearly a year and a half of solitary
confinement.
For a time, I called cells in the solitary units of the Fairfax County Jail,
Southampton Correctional Center, Red Onion State Prison, Sussex 1 State
Prison, and Coffeewood Correctional Center home. Inside those cells, I
counted everything: days, weeks, months, birthdays, and frequently the tiny
markings on the wall. All told, I spent more than fourteen months in isolation
at these various institutions. Author Jack Abbott, reflecting on his time spent in
solitary confinement, wrote that it could “alter the ontological makeup of a
stone.”3 I know that what it does to men and women is far worse.
iii.
A hundred and fifty years is a good spell of time to let pass without
learning a lesson, but a case as secure as a cell in the hole attests to our modern
failure. Jack Abbott’s adage was old news a century before he penned it. The
world’s first prison kept all of its prisoners in solitary confinement.4 Built in
1829, Eastern Penitentiary’s enabling act required that “the principle of solitary
confinement of prisoners be preserved and maintained.”5 Describing this
1.

JOLANTA JUSZKIEWICZ, CAMPAIGN FOR YOUTH JUSTICE, TO PUNISH A FEW: TOO MANY YOUTH
CAUGHT IN THE NET OF ADULT PROSECUTION (2007), http://www.campaignforyouthjustice
.org/research/cfyj-reports [http://perma.cc/KG7A-V4FX].

2.

VA. CODE ANN. § 18.2-58.1 (2015).

3.

JACK HENRY ABBOTT, IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST: LETTERS FROM PRISON 45 (1981).

4.

Matthew W. Meskell, Note, An American Resolution: The History of Prisons in the United
States from 1777 to 1877, 51 STAN. L. REV. 839, 855 (1999).

5.

Id. at 137.

223

the yale law journal forum

January 15, 2016

system, Samuel Wood, Eastern’s first warden, explained that “no prisoner is
seen by another, after he enters the walls.”6 The effects were obvious. One
official observer, British Penal Authority William Crawford wrote, “[t]he whip
inflicts immediate pain, but solitude inspires permanent terror.”7 For some,
including Crawford, this was a good thing; others knew better. When Charles
Dickens toured the facility, he described its system as “rigid, strict, and
hopeless solitary confinement” and denounced its horrors as “a secret
punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.”8
The ASCA-Liman Time-In-Cell report provides the numbers that
underscore the significance of this discussion. According to the report, between
eighty and a hundred thousand men are in restrictive housing.9 Over thirty
thousand are in administrative segregation.10 The report focuses on the latter
group. By arguing that the practice is overused, the report addresses the issue
of isolation as a form of social control within the contemporary prison–and
raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the practice. But the report
leaves equally important work to be done by future scholars. The absence of
the voices of men and women who have experienced administrative
segregation means that the ontologically troubling questions that pervade all
practices involving isolation, whether they be done within a prison (in the form
of administrative segregation) or through the use of supermax facilities or
solitary confinement units, are not fully confronted.
iv .
Why, nearly two centuries after Dickens, does it still take studies like this
one to make us consider the human beings who suffer and whose lives are
often extinguished in these cells? How does a system that critics, prisoners, and
correction officials all recognize as akin to torture remain intact today? The
answer is simple: we justify prison policy based on our characterizations of
those confined, not on any normative belief about what confinement in prison
should look like.
The era of the “supermax”—or super-maximum security prison—arguably
began with Marion Penitentiary. In 1983, Marion gained notoriety in the
6.

Jacqueline Thibaut, “To Pave the Way to Penitence”: Prisoners and Discipline at the Eastern
State Penitentiary 1829-1835, 106 PA. MAG. HIST. & BIOGRAPHY 187, 190 (1982).

7.

Id.

8.

Charles Dickens, Philadelphia, and Its Solitary Prison (1824), reprinted in AM. POETRY REV.,
Nov.-Dec. 2004, at 15.

9.

THE ARTHUR LIMAN PUB. INTEREST PROGRAM & ASS’N. OF STATE CORR. ADM’RS, TIME-INCELL: THE ASCA-LIMAN 2014 NATIONAL SURVEY OF ADMINISTRATIVE SEGREGATION IN
PRISON 3 (2015).

10.

Id.

224

only once i thought about suicide

federal system after prisoners connected to the Aryan Brotherhood gang killed
two correctional officers while being escorted from their cells in shackles and
cuffs.11 Marion prison officials responded by returning to the philosophy of
Eastern Penitentiary and locking the entire institution down. For the next
twenty-three years, men spent twenty-three hours in their cells for every hour
they were allowed outside of them.12 Over the next two decades, more
institutions followed Marion’s approach.13 One was Red Onion State Prison,
which Virginia opened sixteen years after Marion went on total lockdown.
Billed as the state’s toughest prison, Red Onion was meant to house the “worst
of the worst”—a common catchphrase used to legitimate the harsh treatment
of inmates. The Washington Post claimed Red Onion had been built for
“inmates so dangerous that it’s better to forget about rehabilitation and simply
warehouse them.”14 If only this were true. I arrived at the place we all called
“the Onion” months before the Post article appeared. By then I was many
things—barely eighteen years old, frail, young, terrified—but far from the
worst of the worst.
The continued use of solitary confinement as a punitive measure suggests
the correctional officers fail to recognize its negative side effects. But scholars
and medical experts have extensively documented them. One such expert, Dr.
Craig Haney, concluded in 2003 that “[t]here are few if any forms of
imprisonment that appear to produce so much psychological trauma and in
which so many symptoms of psychopathology are manifested.”15 Others in the
field overwhelmingly agree. Dr. Hans Toch has argued that “[t]he most
extreme punitive confinement—such as supermaximum isolation—most
heavily taxes limited coping competence, and leads, literally, to points of no
return . . . . [P]rison cells become filled with prisoners who have withdrawn
from painful reality and quietly hallucinate.”16 But even Dr. Toch does not
capture how overwhelmingly oppressive a cell becomes when the door never
opens. These quotes from his work, too, erase as they reveal. Because inside his
11.

Justin Peters, How a 1983 Murder Created America’s Terrible Supermax-Prison Culture, SLATE
(Oct. 23, 2013), http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/10/23/marion_prison_lockdown
_thomas_silverstein_how_a_1983_murder_created_america.html [http://perma.cc/QQ8H
-AGJC].

12.

See Jesenia Pizzaro & Vanja M.K. Stenius, Supermax Prisons: Their Rise, Current Practices,
and Effect on Inmates, 84 PRISON J. 248, 251 (2004).

13.

Id.

14.

Craig Timberg, At Va.’s Toughest Prison, Tight Controls, WASH. POST (Apr. 18, 1999), http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/april99/supermax18.htm
[http://perma.cc
/6PZ8-6WTX].

15.

Craig Haney, Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and “Supermax” Confinement, 49
CRIME & DELINQ. 124, 125 (2003).

16.

Hans Toch, Foreword to TERRY A. KUPERS, PRISON MADNESS: THE MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
BEHIND BARS AND WHAT WE MUST DO ABOUT IT, at ix–xiv (1999).

225

the yale law journal forum

January 15, 2016

quotes are the lives of men whose stories are lost. Some of them are lost inside
my head. And the ones that are not lost, images of men screaming as guards in
riot gear rushed into their cells, the makeshift nooses—these, even in their
horror, fail to capture how time in a cell can haunt and ruin you.
Fortunately, there have been scholars who have used their research to get
the voices of prisoners into this difficult conversation. In an effort to address
mental health issues among inmates, ethnographer Lorna Rhodes spent eight
years interviewing prisoners in Washington state penitentiaries.17 In one
interview, a prisoner told Rhodes that “[t]he experience [of solitary
confinement] stays with you . . . A strong person with a strong will, if it’s not
breaking them it’s gonna make them into something with a lot of violent
potential, a lot of hostility.”18 The men in administrative segregation are both
visible and invisible. The conditions of their confinement are “concealed from
public and even internal scrutiny behind layers of security precautions” while
“representations of criminals and television documentaries of maximumsecurity prisons highlight the ritualized procedures that contain the
dangerousness of the supermax inmate.”19
Narratives from prisoners reinforce what researchers have found. Rhodes
explored the artwork of Todd Tarselli, a then-prisoner in a Pennsylvania
supermax, to emphasize the way in which administrative segregation “plays
a role in producing or exacerbating mental illness in prison . . . .”20 In
“Decompensation,” named after the psychiatric term for the failure to generate
coping mechanisms in response to stress, Tarselli illustrates a man slowly
losing the ability to recognize who he is and assert himself as an individual.
Another powerful story comes from poet Etheridge Knight, who wrote about
his experience in the hole:
I am being shoved into the Hole. I am stripped naked . . . . I am given a
blanket, and the steel door behind me is shut and locked. It is dark and
chilly in the Hole . . . . I pace the dark space, do push-ups, masturbate,
curse the guards and the gods. Five or six days pass . . . . I begin to slow
down, and the smothering starts. . . . After being in the Hole for a
couple of weeks, not knowing night from day, I begin to lose track of
time.21

17.

Lorna A. Rhodes, Psychopathy and the Face of Control in Supermax, 2002 ETHNOGRAPHY 442.

18.

Id. at 445.

19.

Id. at 446.

20.

Lorna A. Rhodes, Images of Health: Pathological Effects of the Supermaximum Prison, 95 AM. J.
PUB. HEALTH 1692, 1692 (2005).

21.

Etheridge Knight, The Belly Dance, in SINGULAR VOICES: AMERICAN POETRY TODAY 147-48
(Stephen Berg ed. 1985).

226

only once i thought about suicide

These stories, too often untold, animate the ways that time in the hole and
in administrative segregation ruins people.
v.
Today there is no question that solitary confinement and administrative
segregation create psychological problems in prisoners.22 By emphasizing the
immense number of people in administrative segregation, the Time-In-Cell
report creates an opportunity for us to discuss the stories of prisoners that
would not have otherwise received mainstream attention—that would have
gone untold. Eight years and four months in prison, two six month long
stretches in solitary, and four shorter stints in the solitary give me an
abundance of evidence to draw from.
On February 21, 1997, I was transferred from the Fairfax County Juvenile
Detention Center to the Fairfax County Jail. At the time, my friend and
codefendant was housed in the jail’s only juvenile unit. To prevent us from
housing together, the deputies placed me in administrative segregation. For ten
days I awaited a cell in general population. For the first eight of those ten days,
I was denied a mattress, a pillow, or a sheet. Given only a small gray blanket, I
slept on a concrete slab covered in dried mucus and the grime of years without
cleaning. The guy in the cell across from me spent all day talking to himself.
Arguing with himself. Guards and nurses alike ignored his disintegration.
Later, while in administrative segregation at Sussex 1 State Prison, I
watched men strapped down at four points, both arms and both legs. One old
white man refused to shower. Periodically, they opened his cell door and forced
him to bathe. I was in cell 5. The man in cell 6, he was afraid to go into general
population.
At Coffeewood Correctional Center, I remember the exact moment when
the man in the cell next to me lost himself. On the verge of being released to
the general population, he changed his mind, turned around, and demanded to
go back inside the cage that had held him. Once inside, he slammed a plastic
chair against the door, again and again.
The hole broke some men. Others, it didn’t. But while many of their stories
are buried, hidden, this is not always true.
A short time ago, I walked into a local barbershop with a sheaf of papers.
My barber knows that I am a writer and a law student, but he did not know
about the time I spent in prison. That morning the papers I carried were a
printed copy of De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s book about the time he spent in

22.

See Pizzaro & Stenius, supra note 12, at 257 (finding that, despite methodological limitations,
“the vast majority of research suggests that inmates placed in restricted environments . . . for
prolonged periods of time begin to develop psychological problems”).

227

the yale law journal forum

January 15, 2016

solitary confinement. Staring at it, my barber asked if the sheaf of papers was
the start of a new book. I told him no, and explained that I was writing an
essay about solitary confinement. “Why would you be writing that?” he asked.
When I told him about the time I’d spent in prison, in solitary confinement,
and how it has long informed my study of the law, he was silent for a second.
Over the next few minutes, he and I began a dance where we exchanged a fact
at a time, slowly admitting our mutual intimacy with the darkness of the hole.
In De Profundis, Wilde wrote, “[m]any men on their release carry their prison
along with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and
at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die.”23 After I
told him about the long stretches I spent in solitary, he told me that the hole
had almost crushed him. It reminded me of when I was sixteen, alone in the
hole, nearly broken.
When I was sixteen years old and had only been in general population at
the Fairfax County Jail for a few days, the ten-person block where I was
assigned seemed like a scene from Blood In Blood Out or The Shawshank
Redemption. I wanted out and asked to be moved, arguing that the frequent
lockdowns kept me from attending school. They called it writing yourself out
the block. It was a coward’s move, what men who couldn’t protect themselves
did. When a deputy came and informed me that I was being moved to a
different unit, I balked. By this time, I’d lost my earlier fears, and feared more
the stigma that would come from writing myself out the block. In the hierarchy
of shame, only checking into protective custody trumped asking to be moved
from one block to another out of fear. The deputy threatened to put me in the
hole if I did not move. I touched his arm, a childhood gesture. I was trying to
say: I will move, no need for the handcuffs. But before I could speak, he
slammed me against a brick wall. Handcuffed me. Dragged me to a cell in the
hole for assaulting an officer. They tossed me in a cell with a door so thick that
no sound escaped. I was sixteen years old. Each morning they took my
mattress from me so that I could not sleep during the day. How do I explain
this? Each day, I lost a little bit of what made me want to be free. I’ve never
told this story. Those were the longest days of my sentence. One afternoon, in
a fit of panic, I slammed my right fist against the wall. I fractured my pinky. I
thought about suicide. I almost disappeared.
All around us, there are men and women made invisible, their spirits
wiped out by policies that we don’t notice. The Time-In-Cell report forces us to
grapple with their narratives in a way that Due Process and Eighth
Amendment challenges brought to court do not, because the majority of the
thirty thousand people in administrative segregation will never be represented

23.

228

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1905), http://upword.com/wilde/de_profundis.html [http://
perma.cc/RJJ5-SQSC].

only once i thought about suicide

in a lawsuit. But their stories, if we listen, can be found. And those are the
stories that demand change.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a member of the Yale Law School J.D. Class of 2016. He
would like to thank the Liman Program for writing the report that has expanded this
conversation; to Alexandra Cox for her thoughtful comments; to Graham White,
Charlie Bridge, Joe Masterman, Elizabeth Ingriselli, and Michael Clemente of the
Yale Law Journal for editorial assistance; and to the many men who helped him get
through his time in solitary confinement and the men still suffering through theirs.
Preferred Citation: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Only Once I Thought About Suicide,
125 YALE L.J. F. 222 (2016), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/only-once
-i-thought-about-suicide.

229