The Solitary Solution

Summary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: The Solitary Solution
Date: January 28, 2016
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: Jennifer Gonnerman (New Yorker Staff Writer)

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Overview

This episode examines President Obama’s 2016 executive action to end the use of solitary confinement on juveniles, the mentally ill, and minor offenders in federal prisons. Host Dorothy Wickenden and journalist Jennifer Gonnerman explore the widespread use and psychological effects of solitary confinement, its history in American prisons, the slow pace of reform, and the personal impact evidenced in the tragic case of Kalief Browder. The conversation situates solitary within the broader debate over mass incarceration and penal reform in the United States.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Obama’s Executive Action on Solitary Confinement

[01:39 – 02:25]

• Wickenden: Introduces Obama’s recent ban on solitary for certain categories in federal prisons.
• Gonnerman:
  • Notes the affected population is comparatively small, as most U.S. prisoners are in state prisons, not federal.
  • Still, Obama’s move was “almost radical,” raising public attention after years of political silence, setting a new precedent.

Quote:

“I think it was more than a gesture...almost radical...to call attention to a problem that has become so pervasive and yet so ignored by, you know, presidents in the past.”
— Jennifer Gonnerman [02:25]

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2. The Human Cost: Kalief Browder’s Story

[02:44 – 04:02]

• Wickenden: Recalls Obama referencing Kalief Browder, a young man who spent nearly two years in solitary at Rikers Island pretrial.
• Gonnerman:
  • Details her interviews with Browder and describes his visible suffering post-release—physical pain, psychological trauma, insomnia, and loneliness.
  • Brutal sensory deprivation:
    • “The boredom, the screaming of mentally ill inmates…woken at five or six in the morning by airplanes overhead...the incredible heat in the summer, no air conditioning, obviously, and not even a fan. So it just sounded absolutely excruciating.” [03:42]

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3. The Psychological Effects and History of Solitary

[04:02 – 05:16]

• Solitary’s mental health effects (suicide risk, lifelong trauma) have been well documented for decades.
• Wickenden: Surprised that solitary began as a reform meant to prompt self-reflection and repentance, not punishment.
• Major early 20th-century reform efforts (e.g., Thomas Mott Osborne’s work after going undercover as an inmate), but U.S. penal practices became increasingly punitive.

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4. Solitary as a Tool of Prison Control

[05:16 – 05:59]

• As incarceration rates climbed in the 1980s-90s, solitary became a favored management strategy—"a way to maintain control in a seemingly uncontrollable environment."
• Gonnerman laments both the lack of data and the absence of outside scrutiny or accountability:

  “There's nobody really watching...nobody was really counting how many people were in solitary confinement.” [05:39]

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5. Institutional Violence and Lack of Accountability

[05:59 – 07:10]

• An infamous video shows a correction officer violently removing Kalief from his solitary cell—a key piece of evidence Kalief sought to secure.
• The broader point: Abuses often go unpunished, even when captured on camera.

Quote:

“The date had stuck in his mind, not because it was the worst thing that happened to him...but because it was so brazen. All the prisoners know where the cameras are...he knew nothing would have happened to [the officer], and he felt free to be abusive in that way.”
— Jennifer Gonnerman [06:38]

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6. Aftermath and Personal Toll

[07:10 – 08:14]

• Describes Kalief’s disappearance into a psychiatric ward post-release—his family and lawyers were unaware of his whereabouts for days.
• After some recovery, he returned to college, but eventually relapsed and tragically died by suicide.

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7. The International Comparison and Reform Efforts

[08:58 – 10:13]

• U.S. is an outlier in its extensive use of solitary.
• Other countries (UK, Germany) have moved away from the practice, opting for shorter isolation periods and more rehabilitative measures.
• U.S. prison officials increasingly look abroad for alternative approaches.

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8. State and Local-Level Reforms

[09:53 – 10:46]

• Some progress at the state/city level:
  • California, New Mexico, New York have enacted reforms due to lawsuits and advocacy.
  • NYC Mayor de Blasio placed new limits on solitary for those under 21.
• Notably, Obama’s move appeared driven by conscience, not legal compulsion.

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9. Shifts in the Legal Landscape

[10:46 – 11:22]

• Supreme Court ruling: Prisoners under 18 sentenced to life without parole can now request release—a significant step in juvenile justice reform.

Quote:

“It's really sort of an extraordinary moment in terms of a much needed sort of reassessment of our priorities in terms of the criminal justice system.”
— Jennifer Gonnerman [11:18]

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10. Mass Incarceration and Political Will

[11:22 – 12:37]

• Bill Clinton’s public repudiation of 1990s-era “tough on crime” legislation signaled a bipartisan shift in attitudes on mass incarceration.
• Gonnerman notes the term “mass incarceration” is now common parlance, reflecting progress in public awareness, though political and policy action remains inconsistent.
• Hopes further discussion will influence upcoming election cycles, especially among Democrats.

Quote:

“We're not doing enough to rehabilitate the ones we can rehabilitate. We're wasting too much money locking people up that don't need to be there...any policy...that contributed to it should be changed.”
— Bill Clinton [11:46]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On solitary’s psychological toll:

  “From almost the beginning, there was a realization that it had sort of devastating psychological effects.”
  — Jennifer Gonnerman [04:20]

• On political significance:

  “No president has ever even raised the issue of solitary confinement.”
  — Dorothy Wickenden [02:44]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Obama’s announcement & context – [01:27 – 02:44]
• Kalief Browder’s story – [02:44 – 05:16]
• Solitary’s history & reform setbacks – [04:30 – 05:16]
• Solitary as a management tool – [05:16 – 05:59]
• The violence in solitary & accountability – [05:59 – 07:10]
• Browder’s life post-release – [07:10 – 08:14]
• International reform models – [08:58 – 10:13]
• State & local reforms – [09:53 – 10:46]
• Supreme Court juvenile justice ruling – [10:46 – 11:22]
• Mass incarceration in politics – [11:22 – 12:37]

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Tone and Style

The episode is somber, reflective, and deeply personal, especially in recounting Kalief Browder’s experience. Both Wickenden and Gonnerman speak in thoughtful, measured tones, focusing on systemic issues but grounding the discussion in individual human suffering and the urgency for reform.

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a comprehensive and insightful recap of The Political Scene’s ‘The Solitary Solution’ episode on solitary confinement, criminal justice reform, and mass incarceration.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, January 28th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker.

[C]

Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day for months, sometimes four years at a time? That is not going to make us safer.

[B]

That was President Obama last July. This week, in a Washington Post op ed piece, he announced the removal of juveniles, the mentally ill and minor criminals from solitary confinement in federal prisons. Jennifer Gonnerman joins me to discuss the issue and the broader debate about mass incarceration. Hi Jen.

[C]

Hi there.

[B]

Tell us a little bit about solitary confinement and federal prisons.

[C]

Sure. There are about 100,000 people, men and women, in prisons across the country who are in solitary confinement. Most prisoners in America are actually not in federal prisons. They're in state prisons or county jails. Just a small percentage of America's prisoners are in the federal system. But there's solitary confinement there also, obviously.

[B]

So was this just a gesture on Obama's part since it doesn't affect very many prisoners.

[C]

Well, I mean, I think it was more than a gesture. It does affect a small number of prisoners compared to the, you know, the vast numbers that are in solitary confinement nationwide. But I think in some ways it was a sort of almost radical act on his part to call attention to a problem that has become so pervasive and yet so ignored by, you know, presidents in the past.

[B]

As far as I can recall, no president has ever even raised the issue of solitary confinement. He wrote about Kalief Browder, who spent nearly two years in solitary confinement on Rikers island waiting for a trial. You told that story in the magazine in 2014. Could you talk about what Kalief told you about his experience and about his life after he was released?

[C]

You know, I sat down with Kalief many times in 2014 and 2015, and you could just see from meeting him, I mean, I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but just sitting down with him, you could see that he was in pain. You could see that he was suffering. He had gotten out of jail, out of Rikers island in the spring of 2013, having spent three years there and about 2 of those in solitary Confucius confinement. And it sounds like a place which is for those of us who've never been locked up there, almost indescribable. But yet he did try to explain what it had been like, you know, the boredom, the screaming of mentally ill inmates. Rikers island is right near LaGuardia Airport in New York. So being woken at 5 or 6 in the morning by the steady thundering of airplanes overhead, the incredible heat in the summer, no air conditioning, obviously, and not even a fan. So it just sounded absolutely excruciating and almost hard to imagine happening so close to, you know, literally where we're sitting right now in downtown Manhattan.

[B]

Have the long term psychological effects been studied? Obama mentioned that prisoners in solitary, especially juveniles and people with mental illness, are much more likely to commit suicide.

[C]

That's definitely true. And it's a topic that has been studied over the years. And the things that Obama is saying now have been known for a long time. It's not as if we thought solitary worked up until recently. There's a very long history in this country of using solitary confinement. And from almost the beginning, there was a realization that it had sort of devastating psychological effects.

[B]

I happen to have been reading some years ago about solitary. And initially in this country, it was introduced as a form of rehabilitation, which totally surprised me. I guess it shouldn't have, but it was supposed to help Inmates turn inward and repent, as they put it. But even early in the 20th century, it was clear that this was not happening. And there was this big prison reformer, Thomas Mott Osborne, who is an associate of Teddy Roosevelt, who went undercover in Auburn State Prison as an inmate. And then he published a book about his experience in 1914, describing just horrific the conditions were. And it really started a major prison reform movement. The book was known all over the world. And he went on to become the warden of Sing Sing. But prisons in America became more punitive and violent. So what happened to that movement?

[C]

I think as the country ramped up the number of people in prison through the 80s, 90s, you know, we now have more than 2 million people, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Solitary confinement increasingly became, you know, a sort of favorite punishment, a favorite discipline tool, a way to control the population. Essentially. It's a management strategy used by wardens to deal with unruly inmates, a way to maintain control in a sort of seemingly uncontrollable environment. And there's nobody really watching. In the press, we've been talking about a lack of accountability among police officers, among prosecutors, but there's also a lack of accountability, obviously, in the prison system among wardens. Nobody's really watching. Nobody was really counting how many people were in solitary confinement.

[B]

I believe that there's a video of Kalief being kicked by wardens on Rikers.

[C]

We published online a video last year of. It's not actually a warden. It's a correction officer removing Kalief from his cell in solitary confinement on Rikers Island. He was at that time. It's called the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, or the Bing on Rikers Island. And you can see online, the officer removes him from the cell and is supposed to be escorting him to the shower and instead throws him to the ground. And. And it's quite aggressive and violent, at least to me. And, you know, from the very first moment I met Kalief, from the very first interview, he said to me, jen, you have to get this video from September 23rd, I think it was 2012. He remembered the exact date, and he's telling me to get the video. The date had stuck in his mind, not because it was the worst thing that happened to him on Rikers island, but because it was so brazen. All the prisoners know exactly where all the security cameras are, and he knew it had happened in full view of a camera. The documentation of what had happened to him was out there somewhere. And yet this officer, he knew nothing would have happened. To him, and he felt free to be abusive in that way. And Kalief just couldn't let it go. And he would often talk about this incident and urge me to get the video. And I finally did.

[B]

And I remember talking to you after he was released, and you followed him very closely. And he disappeared at one point, and it took quite a while for you to track him down, you know.

[C]

Our piece on Kalief came out in October of 2014, and later that year, around Christmas time, he disappeared for about eight days. I had no idea where he was. His family, he didn't know where he was. His lawyer didn't know. And the lawyer and I were on the phone every day, twice a day, three times a day over that Christmas week trying to figure out what had happened to him. We didn't know if he had ended his life, if something had happened to him, if he had been harmed in some way. And eventually we did find him. He was in the psychiatric ward of Harlem Hospital, and for some reason, nobody had let his family know. So throughout that entire Christmas week, everybody was in a panic trying to figure out what had happened to him. But he, to his credit, emerged from that time and re enrolled in Bronx Community College and was actually thriving in that semester. This is early 2015. And then six months later, went downhill again and ended up taking his own life.

[D]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of consumer, Tech and Culture.

[B]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

[D]

And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week, we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[C]

Right.

[D]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[B]

I want to go back for a second to talk about reform and how it's failed in this country. In the 1980s, as the US was building its first supermax prisons, Britain was moving in the opposite direction, giving the most dangerous prisoners more control, offering work and education programs. Atul Gawande wrote about this in a piece for the magazine some years ago. Has that worked?

[C]

American prison officials are increasingly looking to Europe and elsewhere to try to get new ideas for what they should be doing. America has become such an outlier, having so many thousands and thousands of people in solitary confinement. A large contingent of prison officials went over to Germany a few months back to see what they were doing in German prisons. And everything I think was surprising, including the fact that their solitary confinement really just means eight hours, almost like an extended timeout. It's not about days, months and years being locked up in isolation.

[B]

Some states, like California and New Mexico have made progress, and so have some cities. After your piece came out and there was simultaneously a release of a Justice Department report, Mayor de Blasio introduced initiatives to limit solitary confinement for people under 21. That begins to take effect this month. How much progress has there been outside federal prisons?

[C]

Some states have done a good job on this. You might remember a couple years back, the director of the California state prisons spent about 20 hours, I think, in a solitary confinement cell and ended up writing about it for the New York Times, wrote an op ed. And in Colorado, they significantly reduced the number of people who are in solitary confinement. They are beginning to do the same in California and New York, forced by litigation. But what's surprising and compelling about President Obama's recent announcement is the fact that it's not a lawsuit that's forced his hand to do this. It seems more like a matter of conscience.

[B]

And the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that any prisoner under 18 who has been automatically sentenced to life without parole has the constitutional right to request his release. How important do you think that ruling is going to be?

[C]

I think it's very important. I mean, this issue of life without parole, which Bryan Stevenson, the attorney in Alabama and a number of other people have been working so hard on for so long, has gained incredible traction that solitary confinement, the death penalty, I think we're seeing progress in a number of different areas. It's really sort of an extraordinary moment in terms of a much needed sort of reassessment of our priorities in terms of the criminal justice system.

[B]

And this is, of course, all part of the bigger debate about mass incarceration. There was a major moment last May when Bill Clinton repudiated the tough on crime approach he followed during his presidency.

[E]

I think one of the most hopeful things that's happened in American life is this broad based, I mean, going from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats and people in between saying there's too many people in jail, we're not doing enough to rehabilitate the ones we can rehabilitate. We're wasting too much money locking people up that don't need to be there. And I think any policy that was adopted when I was president in federal law that contributed to it should be changed.

[B]

So there was this moment. This really was part of the public debate. But these days we're not hearing much at all about the subject. Of course, it's less entertaining than Donald Trump, that's for sure. Is it likely to emerge again in the general election campaign?

[C]

Yeah, I think it partly depends on who gets the nomination here. But, you know, at least on the Democratic side, you're really starting to hear about mass incarceration as a subject, as an issue that politicians have to address. You know, and if you think back just a few years ago, I mean, just the term mass incarceration wasn't even known as a term in the public. You would never see that in the papers all the time without explanation. So I think we have come some ways in terms of our public debate, but obviously have quite a ways to go.

[B]

Thanks so much, Jen. Jennifer Gonnerman is a New Yorker staff writer. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and is the author of Life on the the Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. This is the political Scene. This podcast is produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

[C]

You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts in the iTunes store. You can find past episodes of the Political Scene and the New Yorker's fiction.

[D]

And poetry [e-mail] podcast the weekly audio edition of the New Yorker is [e-mail] what the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired? We're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too, Katie. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that, that eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined, in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[B]

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