How to Stay Sane in the Hole

They call it "isolation panic." It can take hold quick, and not ever let go. Whether you've been taken hostage or given an (im)proper sentencing by a jury of your peers (or not), when your entire life is suddenly reduced to a maddeningly small, oftentimes windowless and pitch black box of punishment, an anxious insanity comes knocking. If it's not that, it could very well be crippling depression, hopelessness, deadened cognitive abilities and intellect, memory loss, full-on body-mind breakdown, or some combination thereof, that bubble up from the depths of solitary confinement.

"For some people, there is something terrifying about being placed in an environment where you are completely alone, isolated from others and where you cannot connect to other people," Craig Haney, a psychologist who studies the mental and physical tolls of solitary confinement on inmates at California's Pelican Bay State Prison, tells the BBC.

To be sure, total-isolation cells at Pelican Bay aren't black "holes." They may have no windows to gaze out of while occupying cells the size of double beds, sure, but prisoners there do enjoy flourescent lighting, beds, 90 minutes of exercise every day, and televisons to boot. Hardly luxury, but it could be worse.

Still, the harrowing effects of being alone seem to cut across the entire spectrum of holes. When it's just you, your thoughts and your person, all left to their own devices for up to 23 hours a day, it's only a matter of time before the mind and body become total-isolation cells in their own right--inescapable chambers of shattering psyche and corporeal decay.

So what do you do? How do you stave off the crazies when all you've got are four walls, a floor, oceans of time and, if you're really lucky, a mattress and maybe a few books?

You can always pass the time MacGyvering various DIY smuggle craft in hopes of scoring low-grade drugs to pass the time stoned. Failing that--or at least in addition to mastering the low arts of prisons highs--you've got a few other options.

OWN YOUR SPACE

To hear some prison reformists tell it, that you've been tossed in a hole to begin with is in and of itself something cruel and unusual. That said, you've got to make a show of picking yourself up. So if you're in the most bare bones of holes, with no toilet or bedding, designate a space for sleeping/sitting and a space for shitting and pissing. Just be sure to get a lay of the floor before doing so. Don't put your piss pot in the high corner.

STAY CLEAN

…to the extent that you can stay fresh in a cramped, oftentimes lightless box. Case in point: Fingernails. Pick them with your own nails or, if they're particularly gnarled or broken, use a wall as a nail file. It's about finding all the little things, including basic hygeine, that help preserve your sense of self, that help "retrieve your identity, which is part physical, part psychological," UK-based psychiatrist and trauma expert David Alexander told the BBC.

GET PHYSICAL

In a world marked by long, silent stretches of minimal to zero communications and interaction with everything and everyone outside of the hole, is it any wonder that many hostages and prisoners kept in solitary reach a point whether they no longer believe they exist?

Sing loudly, then. Scream. Talk to yourself. Do sit ups. Do push ups. If you can, read and write. In other words, do anything and everything you can to retain some semblance of bodily presence--even if that means deliberately pissing off the guards to spark a scuffle. This primal, desperate cry for human contact, which in the US penal system is known as "cell extraction," is a harsh reality of a deep-seated need for human touch.

STICK TO A ROUTINE

Establing some sort of daily grind can be empowering, particularly if you're being held hostage. In a lot of ways this echoes the idea that sticking to physical and mental workouts helps you hold on to the only things you've got left, your brain and your body.

What your captors want is to break you down to the point of "learned helplessness," or what clinicians refer to as a prisoner's or hostage's eventual realization that any and all efforts to try and stay sane in the hole won't work. The thinking is that building out your own routine will not only combat that doomed outlook but will also put you into a sort of zen until--if you're lucky--you're released.

Which, unfortunately, is when the real trouble starts. In the US, at least, transition programs to phase former inmates back into the civilian world are virtually non existent in supermax facilities. Many inmates who ride out decades in the hole simply cannot re-adapt to life outside of total isolation. It can be difficult to break habits and behavior picked up in the box. The mind and body can't remember how to function in a boundless space.

And so "in some eerie and tragic cases," Haney, the Pelican Bay psychologist, says of some former inmates of that prison, "people almost literally recreate their cells. One man refused to come out of the bathroom for over a month because he said it was the only room in the house where he felt comfortable. All the other rooms were too large, they made him anxious."

Even if it is possible to stay sane in solitary confinement, the lasting legacy of total isolation may just be a gaping hole of insanity beyond bars.

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson