Slipping beneath the news cycle of fascist rulings in recent weeks, on April 17 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case that asks if extended solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In their response, the Court basically said: “Don’t bother to ask.”

In Hope v. Harris, the petition for the plaintiff described the solitary confinement of Dennis Wayne Hope since 1994 following an escape attempt from prison. For almost 30 years, Hope “‘has spent between 22 and 24 hours per day alone in a 54-square-foot cell. He does not socialize with other prisoners. [He] has been allowed one personal phone call since 1994.’ Specifically, Hope alleged this isolation contributed to mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.”¹

Prolonged solitary confinement has been considered cruel and unusual by the international legal community ever since the post-WW 2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2011, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment said that of particular concern is “any period of solitary confinement in excess of 15 days ... because at that point, according to the literature surveyed, some of the harmful psychological effects of isolation can become irreversible.”^2 3

The following is a small part of the testimony of William Blake, another prisoner who spent decades in solitary confinement. Blake received a 72 years to life sentence when he was 23 years old, for killing a sheriff’s deputy while in court on a drug charge:

I have been in solitary confinement in New York’s prison system for thirty-four years.

Prisoners’ rights advocates call it extreme isolation. Prison authorities have euphemistically dubbed it SHU (pronounced shoe), for Special Housing Unit. Prisoners more aptly call it the box. To folks in society these prison units are known as solitary confinement. They are rows of cages where prisoners are segregated from the general population, locked down for months, years, or even decades alone in a cell with very little personal property and few to no privileges to speak of....

So for more than thirty years I lived in SHU, waking to the screams of madmen in the middle of the night, and smelling their shit when they decided to throw it. I got disciplinary tickets for doing things I should not have done, for doing other things that I would never regret, and for doing things I never did, when a guard decided I needed to be punished more than I already was anyway. I discovered that hopelessness and despair could mean far more than I had ever known before, and learned that loneliness could still sting deep even when a man is sleeping in a row of other men separated by only a few feet and a steel or concrete wall. I experienced a different sort of pain than anything I have felt before, the kind where the bleeding is done all on the inside, in the mind and the soul, and goes on and on through days into years. A number of times I watched as gloom settled over the unit when another SHU prisoner had ended his life with his neck in a bedsheet tied to the grate covering the light in the ceiling, rather than do another day in the box; and I wondered if that would be my own end."⁴

And this was someone who survived, if you call that surviving. A disproportionate number of prison suicides, and suicides soon after release, involve those who were in solitary confinement.⁵

No matter what the legal conviction or prison circumstances, no human being should be tortured in any way.

The almost 30 years spent in isolation by Dennis Hope, the 34 years by William Blake, and the over 40 years in isolation spent by political prisoner Albert Woodfox⁶ are only three of tens of thousands of examples of U.S. prisoners being held for prolonged and indefinite solitary confinement.

Cruel, as usual. As the ultimate deciders, with lifetime appointments, in a system that was alleged to have checks and balances, the fascist supermajority on the Supreme Court must think they are now steering the whole nation down a clear highway toward a Christian Thousand Year Reich. Only revolution can stop them. 

Immediately upon victory, the revolution will implement the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. This Constitution for a whole new, emancipating new society includes the following, under Article III. Rights of the People and the Struggle to Uproot All Exploitation and Oppression, Section 2. Legal and Civil Rights and Liberties; 3. “The following shall apply with regard to the New Socialist Republic in North America and those residing within its territory…. G. With regard to the law, legal proceedings, and punishment in accordance with the law, the following shall apply:… x. Cruel and unusual punishment, including torture, shall be prohibited.” [emphasis added]