Solitary Confinement

Scale, Duration, and the Georgia SMU

Solitary confinement in the United States is practiced at a scale difficult to fully account for. Estimates from 2014 placed the national population in isolation at 80,000–100,000; by 2016, the first Liman Center census counted approximately 68,000; by 2019, 31,542 people were documented in restrictive housing across 39 reporting states — representing 3.8% of the total prisoner population. The 2021 estimate ranged between 41,000 and 48,000, with researchers noting that pandemic-era lockdowns may have expanded use significantly. These numbers should be understood as floors, not ceilings: reporting is inconsistent, definitions vary by jurisdiction, and many states do not disclose data voluntarily. (Solitary Confinement & Restrictive Housing)

Georgia's own record within this national pattern is stark. As of July 2017, 78% of prisoners held in the state's Special Management Unit — 141 of 182 people — had been in isolation for more than two years. (Solitary Confinement & Restrictive Housing) By contrast, the 2019 national census found that 46% of people in restrictive housing had been held for three months or less, suggesting Georgia's SMU represented an extreme tail of long-term isolation even by national standards. The unit also housed a population with significant mental health needs: 39% of SMU prisoners carried a diagnosed mental illness, despite the overwhelming body of evidence that isolation causes and accelerates psychiatric deterioration. That figure almost certainly understates the true prevalence, given the documented failures of mental health screening and care across the Georgia Department of Corrections.

The sheer duration of confinement in Georgia's SMU — measured in years, not days — transforms what correctional administrators often describe as a disciplinary tool into something functionally indistinguishable from indefinite detention in sensory deprivation. The lack of meaningful review, programming, or pathway out is not an accident of administration; it is a structural feature of how the unit operates. Federal courts have taken notice.

Psychological Harm: What Isolation Does to the Mind

The psychiatric consequences of solitary confinement are among the most thoroughly documented findings in correctional research, and they accumulate with time. Dr. Craig Haney's research, drawn from direct interviews with people held in isolation, found that 91% reported anxiety, 86% reported oversensitivity to stimuli, 83% reported social withdrawal, 77% reported chronic depression, 70% reported a sense of impending nervous breakdown, and 68% reported heart palpitations. (Solitary Confinement & Restrictive Housing) These are not marginal or contested findings — they have been replicated across jurisdictions, methodologies, and decades. A 2024 Washington State study randomly sampled 106 prisoners in long-term solitary and administered the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, finding clinically significant depression, anxiety, and guilt in 50% of participants.

The consequences extend beyond psychological distress to physical self-destruction. People with mental illness held in solitary confinement are approximately seven times more likely to self-harm than those in general population. (Solitary Confinement & Restrictive Housing) Most damning is the suicide data: 50% of all prison suicides occur among people held in solitary confinement — a population that represents only 6–8% of the total prison population. This is not a statistical anomaly. It reflects the predictable outcome of placing people with serious mental illness, or people who will develop serious mental illness under the conditions of isolation, into environments that strip away every known protective factor: human contact, structured activity, sensory input, and hope of change.

Georgia's practice of placing 39% of its SMU population — people with diagnosed mental illness — into precisely these conditions represents a documen

Economic Exploitation and the Poverty Cycle

Solitary confinement does not operate in isolation from the broader economic architecture of incarceration. The people most likely to be funneled into prison — and into its most punishing corners — are drawn disproportionately from the poorest communities, the ones most heavily policed and least resourced to navigate the legal system's financial demands. As one incarcerated writer observed: "It cost money to be poor, and it seemed to be a major reason for crime to run rampant in low-income neighborhoods."

The economic extraction begins at sentencing and does not stop. Upon conviction, court-ordered fees and restitutions are typically garnished directly from trust accounts established by the state — establishing, from the outset, a framework in which the incarcerated person's financial life is administered on behalf of the institution rather than themselves. According to the Ella Baker Center, roughly 65% of families with a loved one in prison were unable to meet their basic needs because court-related fines and fees sent them into debt averaging more than $13,000. The Prison Policy Initiative similarly found that 58% of families could not afford the costs associated with a conviction. The debt does not belong only to the person incarcerated — it radiates outward to everyone connected to them.

Inside, wages offer no meaningful counterweight. Incarcerated people in Michigan, for instance, earn an average of $12 to $16 per month from prison jobs — an amount that is wholly insufficient to cover even basic needs from commissary or kiosk vendors. Shoes cost more than $70; food packages through services like Securepak run up to $150; a tablet, including purchased music and games, can exceed $500 in total cost; even storage — an aluminum footlocker to hold belongings beyond the single green duffle bag each person is permitted — costs $150. The gap between what incarcerated people earn and what the prison economy charges them is not an oversight. As one person described it: "Those vendors aim not for the incarcerated person to pay, but their family and friends." The financial burden of incarceration is thus systematically transferred to the families on the outside — families who are, by documented measure, already struggling to survive.

This transfer is structural. The United States Constitution explicitly permits prisoners to be held in servitude, a provision that authorizes mandatory labor under threat of institutional punishment. In Michigan, failure to participate in the prison job pool can result in prolonged isolation — meaning that the labor system and the solitary confinement system are directly linked: work for wages that cannot sustain you, or face confinement as penalty. One incarcerated person characterized this plainly: "My time and money went to MDOC, which makes top dollar off me and other incarcerated people."

The economic pressure on incarcerated people and their families has intensified in recent years. Since 2020, incarcerated people in Michigan have received regular notifications of price increases on clothing and food items available through kiosk vendors. By 2025, tariff-driven cost increases pushed prices higher still, further widening the gap between prison wages and the cost of maintaining basic comfort and connection. Those price increases fall hardest on the people least able to absorb them — a pattern consistent with the broader reality that the prison economy is designed to extract value from poverty, not relieve it.

The framing of incarceration as "paying a debt to society" obscures this dynamic rather than explaining it. When both the person incarcerated and the family of the person harmed come from the same low-income communities — as is frequently the case — the debt framework serves institutional and rhetorical purposes more than it serves repair. "Paying a debt to society has less to do with helping or repairing the victim's family's true desires," one writer noted, "especially if both victim and perpetrator are from the same demographic." What is extracted from incarcerated people and their families does not flow toward healing. It flows toward the state and its contracted vendors.