Solitary Confinement: Punished for Life
The interviews, conducted over the last two years as part of a lawsuit over prolonged solitary confinement at Pelican Bay, have not yet been written up as a formal study or reviewed by other researchers. But Dr. Haney’s work provides avivid portrait of men so severely isolated that, to use Dr. Haney’s term, they have undergone a “social death.”
Sealed for years in a hermetic environment — one inmate likened the prison’s solitary confinement unit to “a weapons lab or a place for human experiments” — prisoners recounted struggling daily to maintain their sanity. They spoke of longing to catch sight of a tree or a bird. Many responded to their isolation by shutting down their emotions and withdrawing even further, shunning even the meager human conversation and company they were afforded.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/04...ness.html?_r=0
btw, I think the for-profit PIC charges states and Feds more for prisoners in solitary vs not solitary.

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"Oh noes! He said the word ' ' and was mean to someone! Federalize the police!" 

uncle tom settling for 35K instead of taking it to court and exposing the system