An important new report, released yesterday by the American Friends Service Committee in Arizona, is the first to focus on the effects solitary confinement has on its survivors afterthey leave prison. Lifetime in Lockdown: How Isolation Conditions Impact Prisoner Reentry, finds that spending time in solitary leaves people "deeply traumatized and essentially socially disabled." These "crippling symptoms" combine with "the extensive legal and structural barriers to successful reentry" to create "recipe for failure." It is hardly surprising, then, that the report is able to "directly link conditions in Arizona’s supermax prisons with the state’s high recidivism rate."
