Erasing the Self: Solitary Confinement and the State’s Control of the Mind
“The hole” at Alcatraz, a cell formerly used for solitary confinement. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
The United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules define solitary confinement as the isolation of prisoners for at least 22 hours per day without meaningful human contact, and classify it as torture when punishment exceeds 15 consecutive days. On any given day, over 122,000 Americans are subjected to such imprisonment.
Used as a tool for discipline and control, solitary confinement is a punishment that deeply erodes the mind in a variety of ways. Individuals subjected to solitary confinement are removed from all forms of social stimulation—conversation, touch, shared experience—which are foundational to human connection. The brain is a social organ; it requires interaction and stimulation to maintain its structure and function. When deprived of that input, the brain begins to atrophy (shrink and weaken from lack of activation). Specifically, the isolation of solitary confinement is harmful to the brain’s structure, neural activity, and cognitive functions,impairing memory, attention and emotional regulation. These changes induce trauma that can last long after release and damage the machinery that allows people to think, feel, and relate. Despite these deleterious consequences to mental health, solitary confinement remains a routine practice in prisons across the world.
This damage lays the groundwork for a deeper ethical conversation. Solitary confinement constitutes a violation of human rights because it undermines both human dignity and neurobiological identity, eroding the brain’s ability to think, feel, and connect.
By stripping individuals of the cognitive and emotional capacities that allow them to participate in society, solitary confinement reduces these individuals to a state of biological survival. This is not just an ethical transgression. It is a political act. It expands the boundaries of carceral power beyond the physical body and allows the state to regulate cognition, thought, and identity itself. When the state reserves the authority to erase personhood, it redefines who qualifies as a full subject of its rights and who does not.
Clinical observations paint a grim picture. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian identified a distinct psychiatric syndrome caused by solitary confinement that was even found in individuals with no prior psychiatric conditions. The symptoms of this syndrome mirrored the effects of delirium. Such a drastic cognitive response shows the extent to which solitary confinement assumes total agency over the individual, creating a serious ethical violation.
This alteration in the brain significantly compromises an individual’s sense of self and identity. Human subjectivity transcends merely being alive; it is also about interpreting the world, reflecting on one’s experiences, and engaging meaningfully with others. These abilities are precisely what solitary confinement destroys. In a 2025 essay, a formerly incarcerated person recalled: “The anxiety that I would feel–and still feel sometimes–and just trying to be around people, especially in public spaces, was incredibly difficult to deal with. I was isolated a lot.” Even three years later, he continues to withdraw: “Every time I feel something, I isolate.”
The learned association between emotional arousal (heightened states like anxiety, fear, or hypervigilance) and emotional withdrawal (numbing, detachment, or emotional shutdown) mirrors the neurological imprinting caused by long-term isolation. Solitary confinement can rewire emotional responses by conditioning individuals to associate social interaction with anxiety or danger, while perceiving isolation as a source of relief or control. The aforementioned testimonies demonstrate how solitary confinement strips individuals of their capacity for social identity, not just their emotional well-being. They live without the mental and psychological frameworks that give life coherence and meaning.
Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Italian philosopher known for his work on biopolitics and the relationship between law and life, describes a state of existence, bare life, as life devoid of political or moral value. Because solitary confinement is state-sanctioned and deliberate, it is a form of control. When the state has the power to isolate a person so completely that their mind begins to disintegrate, it is no longer simply administering punishment. It is exerting authority over the very construction of the self.
Solitary confinement is the concrete enforcement of bare life, dismantling a person's ability to exist meaningfully within society. The state permits survival, but extinguishes participation. Individuals are not only cut off from others, but from the rights, relationships, and roles that once gave their lives structure. They lose the ability to advocate for themselves, to exist in community, to express grievances, or to be seen as full citizens. What’s lost is not just comfort or stimulation, but the scaffolding of personhood itself: memory shaped by interaction, identity confirmed through recognition, and agency grounded in social belonging. Without these, the emotional regulation, trust, and sense of coherence necessary to vote, work, organize, or engage meaningfully in civic life begin to deteriorate.
Solitary confinement does not prepare people to rejoin society. It manufactures citizens in name only, who are politically silenced and socially severed. When the state engineers this erasure, it asserts the power to determine whose humanity is preserved and whose is suspended.
Supporters of solitary confinement argue that it is a necessary tool for maintaining safety and order within institutions. They view it as a form of “punishment by removal,” where privileges are taken away to motivate compliance and gradually reintroduce individuals to the general population. However, this rationale collapses under the weight of the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that prolonged isolation inflicts damage so severe that it fundamentally undermines any claim that the practice is rehabilitative, controlled, or humane. The overwhelming evidence against the carceral practice reveals deep contradictions between its stated principles and the realities of solitary confinement. While human rights laws are intended to protect identity, solitary confinement dismantles it under the guise of control and rehabilitation.
Solitary confinement does not just violate individual rights. It breaches the fundamental principle, enshrined in international human rights law: the state must never exercise complete control over a person’s mind or inner being. When the government possesses the authority to isolate, deconstruct, and ultimately erase the selfhood of incarcerated people, it breaches the ethical boundaries human rights law was designed to uphold. It treats the individual as an object of state control, stripped of agency and managed as a mere biological entity. This is neither discipline nor justice. It is the state-sanctioned erasure of personhood.
Mila Noshirvani (BC ’27) is a staff writer majoring in political science and cognitive science. She is interested in exploring the intersections between law, policy, and the human mind.