And it doesn’t end when they’re set free. Multiple studies have found inmates in solitary are more likely to hurt themselves or attempt suicide than those in general population. Some lost the ability to focus, to interact with people, or to differentiate the real from the imagined. Prisoners have described how isolation has pushed them towards insanity, towards mutilating themselves or flinging feces out of desperation. Both the Pope and the United Nations have classified it as torture, and in June 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that “years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price.” It is an affront to our humanity,” President Barack Obama wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post in January, when he announced a set of reforms to solitary in federal prisons. In recent years, the practice of solitary confinement has faced unprecedented criticism. They had been together less than six hours. Simmons’ body lay on the ground, halfway underneath the bottom bunk. “My cellie is dead,” Sesson told the guard. It took at least 30 minutes, when a corrections officer made his next round, for someone to check on cell 6-38. The men in the cell next door heard a few minutes of muffled fighting through the concrete walls and banging on the door. So Sesson pulled a shoelace from his boots and wrapped it tightly around Simmons’ neck. He picked up a torn, knotted strip of bedsheet, but it split. Sesson lunged back at him and grabbed him by the throat, wrestling him to the ground. Simmons threw the first punch, only grazing his roommate’s face. That’s when Sesson jumped down from the top bunk.
count, and after they replied, he moved on to the next cell. He called both their names for the 9 p.m. Then an officer’s face appeared in the small window in the door. Later that day, they ate dinner on their beds and tossed the empty Styrofoam trays and milk cartons in the corner. So he told Simmons, “If we get into it, I’m not gonna stop.” “Frankly, I am tired of living with people,” he said later. He told them that he would hurt anyone they put him with that’s how desperate he was to be alone. After years of sharing claustrophobic cells with strangers, he was fed up. Sesson thought he had made it clear to the guards that he did not want a cellmate. Simmons told Sesson he was serving a life sentence for murder. The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din. Each had to prove that he would not be messed with, because if something happened - if one attacked the other - there was no escape. And while Simmons was three inches taller, at 5’7”, Sesson outweighed him by more than 100 pounds. He knew he was a “bug,” someone who attacks his cellies. But Simmons had heard a few things about Sesson. When guards locked the door, Sesson didn’t know anything about Simmons: not his name, not what he had done to wind up in prison, or what he did to end up in solitary. Dust and crumbs accumulated in every corner. The paint on the wedge-shaped shelf had almost completely chipped away the beds were caked in rust and the floor underneath the toilet was stained brown and black. The front wall, next to the door, was made of corroded metal. The space itself appeared to be decomposing. The solid door muffled the cacophony of shouting and door-banging ricocheting off the tier.
DEAD CELLS BOSS SOURCE CELL DOOR WINDOWS
There was no natural light, just a fluorescent bulb and small Plexiglas windows that looked out onto the hall. They could palm both walls without fully extending their arms. With a toilet, sink, shelf, and beds, the men were left with a sliver of space about a foot-and-a-half wide to maneuver around each other. The two men would have to eat, sleep, and defecate inches from one another for nearly 24 hours a day in a space smaller than a parking spot, if a parking spot had walls made of cement and steel on all sides. The 4'8"-by-10'8" space was originally built for one, but as Menard became increasingly overcrowded and guards sent more people to solitary, the prison bolted in a second bunk. Listen to the piece here.īut unlike many in solitary, Sesson and Simmons wouldn’t have a moment alone. Reported and published in collaboration with NPR.
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