Solitary confinement has been linked to a variety of profoundly negative psychological outcomes, including suicidal tendencies and spatial and cognitive distortions. Confinement-induced stress can shrink parts of the brain, including the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, spatial orientation, and control of emotions. In addition to these measurable effects, prisoners often report bizarre and disturbing subjective experiences after they leave supermax. Some say the world regularly collapses in on itself. Others report they are unable to lead ordinary conversations, or think clearly for any length of time. The psychiatrist Sandra Schank2 puts it this way: “It’s a standard psychiatric concept, if you put people in isolation, they will go insane.”
Yet Perez pauses when he is asked how it felt to be confined for so long. “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “Because in a sense, you are confined, and in other senses, you’re free.” Perez says he left solitary confinement a better man than he entered it. He is now fully rehabilitated, and works for the Urban Justice Center, where he helps recently released inmates adjust to the world outside.
Perez calls himself an “anomaly,” and says he can only guess at the factors that made him succeed where so many others have failed. However he did it, what’s clear is that the process began with his own imagination.
How Would You Do in Supermax? The Answer May Lie with Imagination and Grit
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