Legislator Enters Solitary Confinement

State Rep. Robyn Porter sat inside a 10 foot-by-12 foot box looking at the blue cinderblock walls. Listening to the sounds of prison, she got a taste of what her son once experienced.

“I started to think about how my son had been in prison and how he had sat in a [solitary] cell,” she recalled Monday.

Porter didn’t go to jail herself. She took a turn sitting inside a replica of a maximum-security prison cell in Wisconsin, newly on display at the downtown Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.

The display, which is known as ​“Inside the Box”, will live at the library until Feb. 4. Then it will be moved to Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library through Feb. 12, before heading to Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School until Feb. 18. (To find a full schedule of events connected to the display click here.)

The exhibit aims to shine a light on the prevalence of solitary confinement — the practice of putting a prisoner alone in a cell for up to 23 hours a day —as an act of torture.

Porter said that sitting in the cell transported her to the time her son was incarcerated. She was slated to have a major surgery. She was nervous and wanted to see her son but was told she couldn’t.

“He had been in a fight, and had been hurt and that was all they would tell me,” Porter said. ​“Imagine having to go under, not knowing how your kid is doing?”

She said her son doesn’t talk much about his prison experience. Not the way she wishes he would. But she and others who attended the opening of the ​“Inside the Box” display got a little taste.

“It just kind of makes you wonder what goes on for 23 hours, when you listen to that,” she said. ​“And even when you get out an are allowed to exercise, you’re still in a cage. It’s not like you’re allowed to go out and be around other people. You’re still solely by yourself. It was very, very heavy sitting in there.”

Keishar Tucker didn’t have to wonder. He has lived the experience. At the age of 17 he was arrested for the crime of threatening and sent to Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire. He ultimately wasn’t convicted of the crime, he said, but he still spent a month in solitary confinement at Northern Correctional Institution, a level five, maximum security prison in Somers.

“I couldn’t cope with being in prison so I would act out,” Tucker said. He ended up in solitary confinement after an encounter with a correctional officer in which he said he fell on the officer, knocking them both down. Tucker said the CO reported the incident as an assault, and he was sent to Northern. He stayed in solitary confinement for a month until he made bond.

“I still suffer anxiety attacks, panic attacks,” said Tucker, who is now 35. ​“It just never leaves you when you endure that type of torture. It never leaves. There are periods where I go on medication, I have breakdowns from enduring that. There are times when I have to be in hospital a week or two weeks. It’s an ongoing thing. It’s definitely torture and should be stopped.”

That is the message — that torture is always wrong — that the sponsors of ​“Inside the Box” aim to send, particularly in light of President Donald Trump’s promises to bring back torture practices.

“At this political time with so much challenging, discrediting of facts and knowledge, that this particular exhibit be in our libraries is important,” said the Rev. Allie Perry, lead organizer of the coalition of groups sponsoring the display. ​“We support our libraries as repositories of knowledge, history and wisdom — as resources that help us all in a democracy, that help us to be educated, all of which is critical for us to have a vibrant democracy and protect it.”

City Librarian Martha Brogan said that when she was approached about hosting the display, she didn’t hesitate. She said the purpose of the exhibit — to experience, educate and advocate — resonates with the library’s original founding mission to provide ​“opportunities for self-education and to participate successfully in self-governance.”

Mayor Toni Harp said that the exhibit is right on time given how people have most recently been denied their rights in this country, and as a reminder of the human capacity for cruelty and inhumane treatment. She pointed out that the United Nations had deemed prolonged solitary confinement a form of torture, but it persists in the United States, denying some 80,000 people a day basic human contact.

“We are at a crossroads,” she said. ​“In my view, the timing of this exhibit … couldn’t be better … in terms of human rights and human dignity.”

“We’re very focused on punishment but not as focused on people,” said State Sen. Gary Winfield. We’re focused on building prisons where we design them in such a way that if you go into prison you are broken. We’re focused on building cells like that that break you. We don’t really just throw these people away. They come back to our communities, back to our families. They come back to us. When we focus on punishment, not people, we create problems for ourselves.”

Porter echoed Winfield’s sentiments.

“We have laws and rules and people going crazy about what you do to animals, dogs and cats, but then look at people who are labeled criminals,” she said. ​“We strip them of all of that. Their dignity, their humanity, we damage them in ways we can’t even imagine because a lot of the damage is not visible. It’s spiritual damage, mental damage, damage that you can’t calculate by just looking at someone.

“But I bet you can see it when you look into somebody’s eyes,” she said. ​“Those things start to show up. And it doesn’t make us any safer. I think it actually puts us in jeopardy and makes us less safe. You have people who sit in those cells for years on end. And then they release ​‘em and drop ​‘em off. And what do you have? You don’t know. You don’t know what you have you don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Porter said if you treat people like wild animals, they might start to behave like them.

“That’s what we created,” she said. ​“We did that as a society. We have allowed that to go on and I think it’s high time that we say enough is enough.”