(Content warning: Solitary confinement)
Dear Mom,
It’s the holiday season again, and if you know one thing about me, it’s my love for sending holiday cards via “snail mail”. With each year comes an in depth review of every picture I’ve taken of the dogs in order to select the perfect one for holiday greetings.. Even landing in jail right before Christmas didn’t stop the tradition. With the help of members of Transform Dane, holiday cards were sent on my behalf. This year, however, my holiday mail looked a little different than usual.
For the last month, I’ve been pouring myself into something that started as a simple project and turned into something deeply personal: a resource guide for people inside our local jails and prisons. It’s care from outside in the form of pages of organizations that offer re-entry support, education programs, health and mental health services, addiction recovery, legal tools, writing and art programs, and LGBTQ+-specific resources.
Last week, these guides were mailed out in holiday care packages, and while the act of giving always means more this time of year, this particular one holds a larger place in my heart. This guide grew out of a place where I once had nothing.
When I think about why I worked so hard on this, my mind snaps back to solitary confinement, or “seg”—a concrete tomb smaller than a gas station bathroom. What isn’t always fully understood about solitary confinement is the depths beyond which it is more than just “being alone.” It’s the stripping away of every single thing that keeps a person tethered to themselves.
In solitary, the silence isn’t quiet; it’s loud. Time doesn’t pass; it dissolves. There’s nothing to occupy your mind except the things you’re trying desperately to recover from. No book to take your mind somewhere else, no program to guide recovery from the alleged conduct, no conversation to remind you you aren’t losing your mind.
These conditions literally meet the internationally-accepted definition of torture. Inside, you learn quickly that a key component of any rehabilitative value of a jail is social. Whether you like it or not, the human beings inside are your peers. Many of those peers understand the severity of the crime, their addiction, the state of their mental health, and the consequences of their actions. Their outward acknowledgment of those issues act as group therapy. It is shared processing and learning of the exact topics we have been sent there to learn and process. Even those in denial, dealing with maladaptive thinking or not intending to change echo back valuable lessons; when you hear the reasoning that lead you to your own actions being echoed by someone else, they start sounding less logically sound or healthy.
Click Here for the Resource Guide
While I can’t force the Dane Co Jail or any other institution to shut down solitary confinement today, I can create something that provides an immediate opportunity for connection. It is something I would’ve treated like gold while housed in “seg”. Made of only paper and ink, the “institutional security” risk of the actual physical item is extremely low. The connection to the outside world, to something tangible and real, is the difference between insanity and hope while living in your own tomb.
With that, the resource guide became more than a project. It became a refusal to accept the idea that isolation is an acceptable condition for human beings; especially those who are already struggling with addiction, mental health, and trauma before they ever get locked up.
For someone inside, especially someone sitting in a cell with more questions than answers, this guide might be the first spark. It might be that moment of recognition: Here’s something I can try. Here’s a place that will answer my letter. Here’s a path I didn’t know existed.
It isn’t a magic fix. But it is a direction. And when you’re inside, having even one direction is a lifeline.
My own sobriety and healing have become possible not just because I’m not using. Just not using isn’t enough if the thought patterns and practices that underlay your addiction remain the same. (Alcoholics Anonymous aptly refers to this practice as a “dry drunk”). Recovery lives in connection to the world around you and your active participation in life, in the same manner that addiction thrives in isolation and avoidance.
The immediate need to end long term solitary confinement is real. If I were to envision what system could be put in place to exacerbate addiction and mental health issues, I would design the exact system I witnessed in DCJ “seg”. Addiction isolates us. Shame isolates us. Trauma isolates us. And then, as a society, we respond to addiction and trauma with the most extreme form of isolation we can fit in a cells designed to challenge the human physical and psychological limits of isolation for extended periods of time.
Mom, I’ve passed the holidays in many ways, different states, different countries and different people over the years. There is an unexpected joy this season, of giving hope to those who don’t know who I am, have never met me, and in many cases, feel as if nobody in the world sees them anymore. If I can reach those souls these holidays, my own path out of the depths of addiction seems a lot more helpful too.
It’s time for me and as a society to begin believing again in the restorative power of building up rather than breaking down. I’m grateful for the team at Transform Dane for throwing themselves into this project with me. I handed over a slightly chaotic spreadsheet of community resources to my “badass team of weirdos,” and without hesitation they were busy turning it into a foldable handbook, checking the “inmate rosters” and “DOJ locator tools”, and carefully packaging each finished guide to send into these institutions.
Happy holidays Mom, and to all reading. My hope is that this season we can bring a little more connection to the people who need it most.
Still me,
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