Solitary Confinement: A Cyclical System Undermining Rehabilitation

Solitary confinement is one of the most damaging and misunderstood practices in U.S. prisons. Here’s how it really works—and why it must end.

Solitary confinement remains widespread across state and federal prisons, where facilities confine people in near-total isolation for 22 to 24 hours a day, with minimal human contact, limited access to programs, and almost no therapeutic support. Prison systems have long justified this practice in the name of safety and control, but a growing body of research shows that solitary confinement produces far broader consequences—driving cycles of trauma, instability, and lasting harm that extend beyond prison walls and into people’s lives after release.

Recently, we had the opportunity to interview two researchers, Dr. Dallas Augustine and Dr. Natalie Pifer, who, with colleagues,  released a groundbreaking co-authored study in 2025: Unexceptional Patterns of Solitary Confinement: Cycling and Reentry Shocks Within the Prison. Drawing on research across five Washington state prisons, their work reveals that solitary is not an isolated event but a recurring cycle—shaped by institutional incentives and producing profound psychological and systemic disruption. 

In this article, we map the structural logic of solitary confinement—how the system operates, what it reinforces, and why marginal reforms fail when the underlying goals of incarceration remain unchanged.

Conditions and Consequences of Solitary Confinement

The term “solitary confinement” may evoke images of extreme punishment, but the practice has become disturbingly routine in modern prisons. Prisons refer to solitary confinement by many names—Administrative Segregation, Special Housing Units (SHU), or Intensive Management Units—and use it in response to behavior ranging from violence to minor infractions like disobedience or possession of contraband. Facilities also place people in isolation preemptively, often based on suspected gang affiliation or under the label of “protective custody.”

Once inside, the conditions are often stark and psychologically destabilizing. Incarcerated people may spend 23 hours a day alone in a concrete cell. Human contact is rare. Programming, if available, is minimal. Access to medical care—especially for mental health—is grossly inadequate. Prison systems often keep people in solitary confinement for months or even years.

Psychological Impacts of Solitary Confinement

Researchers have thoroughly documented the psychological impacts. Visual and auditory hallucinations, paranoia, severe depression, and suicidal ideation are common outcomes of long-term isolation, leading to half of all suicides in U.S. prisons occurring in solitary confinement. Additionally, individuals who have spent time in solitary confinement are 78% more likely to die by suicide within the first year of release.

Despite it’s widespread use of solitary confinement, public understanding of solitary confinement remains limited. “There’s this perception that solitary confinement is rare, that it’s used for the most dangerous people or the worst behavior,” said Dr. Dallas Augustine in her interview. “But that’s just not what the data shows. It’s far more common and much more mundane.” 

In reality, solitary confinement has become a routine feature of prison management, often deployed as a default tool to address space, staff shortages, and institutional order. Its normalization means that thousands of incarcerated individuals experience extreme isolation not for violent acts, but for logistical convenience or vague assessments of risk.

The Cycle: Solitary as a Rotating Door

The most striking finding in Augustine and Pifer’s collaborative research is the revelation that solitary confinement is usually not a one-time event. It is a recursive process—a cycle of removal and reentry that becomes embedded in an individual’s incarceration trajectory, with individuals in this study cycling in and out of isolation an average of six or more times during a single incarceration.

Interviews conducted over time show that staff often released individuals back into the general population without support or preparation—leading many to return to solitary confinement again and again. These cycles, the researchers argue, are not anomalies; they are the rule for most people experiencing solitary confinement. 

“People weren’t just sent to solitary once,” Dr. Augustine explained. “They cycled through it. They are released, destabilized by the transition, get into trouble, and return. Solitary was being used as a routine management tool.”

This revolving-door dynamic creates what the researchers term reentry shocks, which they borrow intentionally from the traditional reentry from prison literature. Much like the trauma of reentering society after release from prison, these intra-institutional shocks destabilize individuals as they move from isolation to general population settings. The lack of transitional support in many systems compounds the impact, creating psychological whiplash.

The Reentry Shocks of Solitary Confinement

In their research and interviews, Augustine and Pifer identify three core types of “reentry shocks” that individuals experience when transitioning from long-term solitary confinement back into the general prison population. These shocks represent a cumulative, compounding harm that often drives people back into isolation.

1. Sensory Overload

Augustine explained that staff often released participants from environments of extreme sensory deprivation—where lights stayed on 24/7 and meaningful stimuli were absent—into general population settings that overwhelmed them with constant noise and visual input. “There’s a myriad of noises occurring at all times. It’s loud. There’s a bunch of visual stimuli and then also social stimuli as well,” she noted. Individuals often coped with this by re-isolating themselves within their cells or seeking other ways to withdraw.

2. Social Reintegration Challenges

Another shock involved difficulty navigating social interactions. Augustine described “issues around social regulation and ability to reintegrate socially,” as individuals struggled to readjust to interpersonal dynamics after extended isolation. These difficulties often led to conflict, distress, and in some cases, disciplinary infractions.

3. Distorted Perceptions of Time and Self

Perhaps most unsettling was the third category of shock: distorted perceptions, both of time and identity. Some individuals experienced time as speeding up, slowing down, or losing track of it entirely. Others reported a loss of connection to their own bodies and selves. Augustine explained that at the time of the study, solitary cells didn’t have mirrors: “People were going years at a time never seeing their own reflection.” As a result, individuals lost touch with how their bodies had changed and experienced a deeper disconnection from their own identity.

Possibly as a result of these shocks, some individuals began to perceive solitary confinement as a more stable environment than the chaotic settings they were reentering. As Pifer noted, “For some folks, solitary confinement or being in isolation did feel like an easier place to cope.” This sense of safety led some to intentionally or subconsciously sabotage their own transitions out of solitary. 

Augustine described individuals who “engage[d] in some sort of behavior they knew would result in an infraction… to get themselves back into solitary,” where the conditions—while harmful—were at least familiar.

Incentives, Not Outcomes

Solitary confinement continues not because it produces results, but because it aligns with a carceral logic that prioritizes control over rehabilitation. Augustine and Pifer emphasize that the American prison system doesn’t aim to reduce harm. Instead, it enforces order through punishment as its central tool.

One of the central insights from their study is that many reform efforts fail because they misdiagnose the problem. Laws that restrict the maximum number of days in solitary confinement, such as those aligned with the United Nations’ Mandela Rules, which define prolonged isolation as more than 15 days—do little to address the  cycling phenomenon. “The primary issue with solitary confinement isn’t just length,” said Dr. Augustine. “It’s a recurrence. And none of the proposed policies address that.”

Even worse, these efforts may unintentionally reinforce the legitimacy of solitary confinement by making it appear more humane. Shaka Senghor, who spent nearly seven years in solitary confinement, spoke about his experience on The Last Mile Radio: “Solitary isn’t just a place. It’s a condition you carry with you, years later. And there’s no real path back unless the system gives you one.”

The incentives that govern solitary confinement’s use are misaligned with any notion of rehabilitation. Correctional officers and administrators often use isolation as a means of risk management, and prisons lack resources to support alternative interventions. Without changes to the underlying goals of incarceration, reforms that focus only on surface-level fixes will always fall short.

Solitary Confinement and Reentry

A troubling institutional practice compounds this risk: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that any time spent in solitary confinement increases the risk of death after release by 24%, with a 127% higher risk of opioid overdose in the first two weeks. 

This risk grows even more dangerous because many prison systems release people straight from solitary confinement to the street. “There are instances of people leaving solitary and being released directly to the street,” Dr. Natalie Pifer noted. “They were not getting any of the support or preparation they needed.”

Without transitional services, therapeutic intervention, or community support, the trauma of long-term isolation doesn’t end at the prison gate—it follows people into every corner of their lives. It impairs employment prospects, strains relationships, and destabilizes mental health, creating a reentry process shaped more by abandonment than rehabilitation.

As Billie Edison shared in her interview on The Last Mile Radio, “After being in that kind of place, it’s like you forget how to be around people. You don’t know who you are anymore. And they just expect you to come out and start over like nothing happened.”

The Last Mile: A New Operating System

Solitary confinement cannot be ‘fixed’ by shortening stays or tweaking placement protocols. It must be replaced by systems that align incentives with measurable outcomes—systems where the goal is human development, not behavioral suppression.

The Last Mile is using this research to help design what the future of incarceration can and should look like. TLM is developing models built around defined ‘north star’ metrics for employment and recidivism that act as operational benchmarks, shaping every layer of system design from incentives and technology to culture and programming.

By building backward from outcomes, rather than forward from legacy constraints, The Last Mile is charting a path toward incarceration systems aligned with rehabilitation—not containment.

This is what makes The Last Mile different: it doesn’t start with programs. It starts with outcomes, then aligns incentives, builds culture, deploys technology, and finally—only then—implements programs. In doing so, it avoids the trap that most reform efforts fall into: adding services to a system fundamentally designed for punishment.

The Future Of Confinement and Rehabilitation

Solitary confinement is a legacy system. Its logic is rooted in bureaucratic convenience and operational control, and its outcomes are only measurable in trauma. It persists in the United States because we’ve failed to imagine what comes next.

Dallas Augustine and Natalie Pifer have shown us the hidden patterns that sustain solitary—the cycling, the shocks, the incentives. This fresh perspective is revealing a necessary blueprint for a new kind of system—one that prevents institutional harm by prioritizing stability, reintegration, and accountability, and that builds pathways for growth rather than reinforcing cycles of isolation.

This is the future: one where prison systems are measured not by how effectively they punish, but by how powerfully they prepare people to return home. To build that future, we must treat every legacy practice—especially solitary confinement—not as an untouchable doctrine, but as a technology overdue for retirement.

The next generation of justice won’t be built in the hole. It will be built in classrooms, studios, and job interviews. And it’s already begun.

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By Robert Roche, VP of Marketing at The Last Mile

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