Should prisoners have to spend decades enduring the physical and mental anguish of solitary confinement? Should they have to wonder what they even look like anymore? Because it took a hunger strike for prisoners to earn the right to have their pictures taken. For 25 years, so much as a photograph they could send to their families was banned. Now, they get one photo a year. And what those photos reveal about life in solitary confinement is startling.
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1. Stephen Slevin spent 22 months in solitary confinement while his family searched for his whereabouts.
For the first few months of his confinement, Stephen wrote letters to the county jail's nurse, whose reply amounted to an increase in his sedatives. He ended up with bed sores, a fungal skin infection, lost a third of his body weight, and he was forced to remove his own tooth when it developed an abscess. After his release when the charges against him were dropped due to his understandably reduced mental condition, he sued the county and won $15.5 million in damages.
2. Randall Ellis spent 30 years in isolation at Pelican Bay State Prison in California.
"Physically I'm much older. Mentally, I'm more thoughtful and distrusting of people," he wrote.
3. Michael David Russell received a sentence of 25 years and 8 months for assault with a firearm and has spent most of the past 17 years in isolation.
After seeing the first photo of himself in more than a decade, he wrote that, "You think odd thoughts, scenes from a simpler, freer life...Then the changes both in a physical and mental way, I’ve grown older, then the weight of its reality breaks your heart and the quest for sanity forces you to your knees, an anguish echoes in your soul, ‘will I die here’?”
4. Convicted of murder in 1977, Lorenzo Benton has spent 27 years in isolation.
"The time in between these photographs, it was a time in which I aged dramatically," he wrote, "Resulting in many people hardly remembering me. Now I am 57 years old, going bald on top, with a lot of gray hair on my head and face."
5. While serving 24 years for second-degree murder, Jose Garcia has spent more than a decade in isolation.
"I never understood why I had to take a hunger strike to get a photo program or other basic thing but that's how the state's prison system is, just punishment, no rehabilitation," he wrote.
6. Sentenced to 25 years for second-degree murder, Byron Bunt was put in isolation after being linked to a prison gang.
After 20 years in isolation, "I know my family was shocked to see how I looked after not seeing me for years," he wrote.
7. Constantine Aguilar's third strike, receiving stolen property, got him a 25-year sentence.
"My family thought I was sick when they finally received a photo of myself," he wrote. "I have white discoloration spots on my face and neck from the lack of sun after 15 years in isolation here in the SHU."
8. Marcus Harrison drew a self-portrait soon after receiving a life sentence for attempted murder in 1997.
"For the most part, it is the love of family that gets us through the psychological torture/warfare that is constantly being waged against us," he wrote. "Without the connection to family, it would further diminish any sense of normalcy within these torture chambers."
9. Gabriel Huerta, in prison for 17-to-life for second-degree murder, was put in isolation in 1989 as the suspected leader of a prison gang.
"I always had a tint of copper to me. Now I'm just pale," he wrote. "At home, your family has updated photos of everyone but you. It can appear that you must have died or something if someone were looking through the family album. The whole system seems to be geared at breaking down and destroying our family connections."
10. Pietro Sartoresi's family hasn't seen a photo of him in 15 years.
"You wake up and you go to sleep to concrete. There's no windows in our cells," he wrote. "There's no breeze out in the yard. You know. There's no shadows. I mean, I'm pale you know. I haven't had sun on me in a long time."
11. In Japan, the world's longest-serving death row inmate, Iwao Hakamada, was released after serving 48 years for a quadruple murder pending retrial.
He was convicted largely on a confession that had been beaten out of him. When he was released, he had spent nearly a half-century in a five-square-meter cell, and he was unable to make much sense when talking and was prone to sudden outbursts of anger.
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