Channeling my inner Charles Dickens, very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony solitary confinement has inflicted upon me. These last twelve months in solitary confinement have been a terrible endurance that none but these whom have suffered the like can fathom. Long term solitary confinement is a mode of punishment which no man has a right to inflict upon a fellow human being.

I hold that this insidious daily tampering with the mysteries of the mind is immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. And all who have been subjected to this nefarious punishment must return to society morally unhealthy, diseased of mind, and unfit for the rough and tumble contact and busy action of the real world.

Long term solitary confinement as a mode of punishment must be abolished if we are to stake the claim of being a civilized society. Only the most depraved could sanction this protracted wasting of the flesh and slow mortification of the spirit as a legitimate form of human punishment bereft of all hope of promise.

The vast majority of human beings who have endured long term solitary confinement are transmogrified into zombies -- living breathing creatures with no heart nor real feelings, senses numbed, dulled, and atrophied by extended extreme isolation and deprivation of real human contact. They are like a caged bird who after years of not using its wings is released only to realize that, despite retaining the appendages of wings, it can no longer achieve flight, the muscles and nerves required having wasted away.

Long term solitary confinement as a mode of punishment is reprehensible to modern human conscience and must be abolished, permanently discarded upon the pile heap of the history of barbaric man devised cruel and inhumane punishments like quartering, the rack, and crucifixions.

Written by: Trevor Mattis

BH 3126

February 2017