The glass-eating prisoner is a case John Kiriakou has cited as the sharpest available illustration of what long-term solitary confinement does to a person. He attributes it to an in-depth New York Times Magazine article on the federal Special Housing Units published in May 2015.[1]
The case
The man had been held in the SHU at the federal supermax at Florence, Colorado for something like eighteen years — eighteen years, in Kiriakou’s summary, without human contact. He went insane.[1]
Cells of that kind have a window two or three inches wide, barely enough to admit a little light. The prisoner broke his and ate the glass, so that the institution would be obliged to take him to a hospital where he could talk to another human being.[2]
What he draws from it
Kiriakou’s response to the case is not analytical. “Shame on us,” he said of it, “shame on us for pretending that we’re better” — and then, immediately, the consequence: “and then we wonder why our recidivism rates are so high.”[2] His conclusion is that the system reforms nobody, because reform is not what it is doing. “We’re just torturing them.”[3]
The case sits inside his broader position that solitary confinement is torture as a matter of settled international standard rather than opinion: the United Nations treats anything beyond fourteen days as a form of torture, and he invites doubters to test the proposition by locking themselves in a closet for a single day.[4] Eighteen years is roughly four hundred and seventy times the United Nations threshold.