Reactions and Attributes of Prisoners in Solitary Confinement

In order to explore the effects of solitary confinement (SC) on penitentiary inmates, data were collected from volunteer respondents at five U.S. and Canadian prisons. Besides a structured interview, measures of personality, intelligence, mood, subjective stress, and creativity were administered. A questionnaire was used to identify ways of coping with the SC experience. Although the prisoners as a group differed from standardization samples on some of the tests, there were no dramatic differences between convicts who had experienced SC and those who had not. These data, which are unusual in that they were collected from actual convicts who were responding to SC as it is normally administered in their institution (as opposed to volunteer subjects under special conditions), do not support the view that SC in prisons is universally damaging, aversive, or intolerable.