Stuff You Should Know - Solitary Confinement: Cruel and Unusual

Episode Date: March 21, 2017

In our continuing exploration of crime and punishment, we take a look at the practice of solitary confinement. To be sure, it has its place in prisons, sometimes for protection of the inmates themselves. However, leaving people in solitary for weeks, months and even years is another thing. We explore this cruel and unusual punishment in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the sheer joy of podcast listening.

That's right, it's T-R-Y Pod, still a nascent industry. A lot of people don't know what podcasts are, and it helps everybody out, if you would go out and just say, hey, family member, who I see at Thanksgiving once a year, you should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what they are, here's a cool show you should try, and here's how to get it.

Yeah, and it doesn't have to be our show, just any podcast you like in general that you think someone else would like. Just share it, yeah, yeah. So get on board the tripod train. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Here we go. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark,

and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know. Crime and punishment, part 28. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff on this, and I thought we got more coming. I kept, keep saying we're done, but we're not done, because while we touched on solitary confinement in our prisons episode, which was a great one.

Was it, have you gone back and listened recently, or are you just making assumptions? No, I just remember it being a good one. It stands out, is one of our good ones. This is, you know, a little more robust look at solitary confinement, and the ins and outs, mostly outs, don't you think? Yes, and not just me.

There's like a whole growing body of people who are kind of screaming their heads off, I guess. Yeah, saying like, hey, put a person in a tiny room with no interaction or stimulation for 23 hours a day, not good for you as a human. Right, and a lot of people are going so far as to say, this constitutes cruel and inhuman punishment. Yeah, it's kind of like a zucosis for humans.

Right. We talked about that in our zoos episode. Yeah. You know? Yeah, where the animal goes insane. Yeah, what it's not is Steve McQueen in The Great Escape throwing the baseball against the wall. You could probably do that for like a half hour.

No, they wouldn't give you a baseball. No, that's true. You know, there's nothing funny or cute about it. Right. All right, shall we? Yeah, let's. So solitary, it is a huge controversial thing right now because a lot of proponents say it's extremely necessary

and that this is just the way that you're supposed to punish people or that it's just needed even without punishment or other people say, no, this is cruel and inhuman like we said, regardless of how you slice it, it's actually an American product. It's an American export. It's being used all over the world right now.

Yeah, and depending on where you are and what prison you're in, they might call it something else. They have a lot of, I mean, in this article, the House of Works article, they, you know, call it like lockdown, restrictive housing, segregation, isolation, but I saw a lot more creative names that prisons use that, you know,

try to shine it up a bit as something other than what it is. Right, in what it is, no matter what you call it, is it's confining a prisoner to a relatively small cell. I saw it usually eight by 10 or less. And I also saw that frequently compared to a horse stable in which comparison that the prison cell actually comes out smaller of the two. And you confine that person, this is the key,

you confine that person to that small cell for between 23 and 24 hours a day, every day. Yeah, well, I think 22 to 20, like some people never leave. It depends on the day. So in some cases, you'll be confined like that for 23 hours a day and then one hour a day, you get out to exercise and shower.

But maybe that's just on weekdays. So at weekends, you would be in there for 48 straight hours. Right, or maybe if the guard doesn't like you or is in a bad mood, they might just not let you out that day. And we don't wanna paint corrections officers as the movies do a good enough job of demonizing them. Yeah, and if you look into some of the people

who are being held in solitary, some of the people who started solitary or have stayed in their longest, you kind of understand why someone would want to keep them as far away from people as possible. So it's a complex issue. It's not cut and dried. There's not an obvious villain in this story

and an obvious victim in this story. Yeah, so like I was saying, we don't wanna demonize them because it's happened enough in media and certainly films Tom Hanks' aside, I guess, in The Green Mile. He just, he can't help but be delightful. He played a, well, he was actually kind of,

I was about to say road to perdition. He was the good guy. He was an anti-hero, though. Yeah, a bit of an anti-hero. But anyway, we're not gonna do that, but that does still happen. That's why prison reform is still a thing because there still is a lot of abuse that happens

in certain prisons and among certain prison guards and correctional officers. So it's certainly not something that's been solved. I just like to see away a little bit because I know that we have prison guards that listen to our show. And Chuck, we should say the whole point of solitary is to limit human contact as much as possible.

So even though you are maybe interacting with a guard here or there, it's when they slide your meal in three times a day. And that's it. You don't see people, you exercise alone. Everything you're doing is alone. That's the point. That's why they call it solitary confinement.

It is. So there's a couple of types of segregation that can happen. One's called disciplinary segregation. That is pretty obvious. You have done something that has run afoul of the prison rules, which can range from legitimate things like,

you start a fight or you attacked another inmate or whatever. Got caught with an extra honey bun? Maybe so, or you stole something to a little more petty things. And that's where solitary gets real hinky. Like maybe you talk back to a guard and they didn't like hearing that.

So they're like, all right, you go to the hole for 30 days. Right, or maybe somebody snitched on you and you were framed, clear and simple. Right. So that's disciplinary segregation. There's also administrative segregation. And this is, you might be put in there if, let's say you're a sex offender who notoriously

have a rough time in prison or you're a gang member who has started some trouble. And basically they're trying to protect, supposedly trying to protect the prisoner from harm. Yeah. By isolating them from the population. Yeah, but whether they wanna stay in the regular population or not,

that decision's made for them. Right, and that's just one type of administrative. You can also be put in if the regular cells are full and they're just full up. So sorry, you gotta go to solitary. Yep. With overcrowding, that's obviously a big deal. Pre-trial, you can go in.

If you're not even convicted of a crime yet, it might be put in solitary. There should be a constitutional amendment that prevents that. Yeah, I read the story. Actually, I heard it on NPR this weekend, which is what made me think of this thing. There's a documentary on Spike TV

called The Khalif Browder Story. Is that the kid who stole the backpack? Yeah, did you hear that? No, I just knew about it while it was going on. Yeah, this guy, Khalif Browder, when he was, I think he was 16 at the time, stole a backpack from a party. He and his buddy get,

get, I don't know if they were in a car, got pulled over, but they get arrested. They let the one guy go, but Khalif Browder had a prior charge. So they kept him for more than three years in the Rikers Island Jail Complex. And a lot of that was in solitary confinement. And this before, ultimately, the charges were dropped.

He wasn't even convicted of a crime. And he was in solitary for three years. He finally gets out. He committed suicide less than a year after. And it's just one of the, gee, he's one of the more egregious and sad examples of just how broken the system can be here in the United States.

Right, another way that it's being used, that's just as egregious as pre-trial, in my opinion, is to house the mentally ill. Right? After the 80s, when Reagan closed down the massive institutions, it had become like huge places of abuse of the mentally ill in favor of more community servicing of mental health,

but then didn't fund the communities so that the mentally ill just ended up on the street, right? Prison became the new institutions for housing mentally ill people. Well, apparently, a favorite place to actually house the mentally ill in prison is in solitary confinement. And as we'll see, ostensibly,

just being put in solitary confinement, if you have a completely healthy mind, is really, really bad for your mental state. If you're already mentally ill, or predisposed to mental illness, it can be a death sentence for you. Yeah, and in the United States, they don't have exact numbers

because it's just states vary in what they consider confinement, solitary confinement. Not a lot of prisons want to participate in studies. There's no reporting? Not very much, you know. But I have the impression, Chuck, that you could be like a congressperson saying, like, I want to tour your solitary wing

and you would get turned down. There's like that level of self-administration by the Bureau of Corrections inside prisons. Yeah, so the numbers vary, but basically, most people say, up to 100,000 inmates in the United States. And again, not all of these are in prison, some of them are in jail,

some of them are in immigrant, temporary immigrant housing are kept in isolation. And there isn't a, you don't go before a court to get put in the hole. You, you know, a prison official will dictate this. There is no recourse for a prisoner. They call the shots, there's no oversight. Can be indefinite?

You can't call your attorney and say, hey, I'm in solitary and I didn't do anything. I'll just talk back. I've been in here for six months because the guard has a problem with me. There's nothing that can be done, basically. No, so that makes it an extra judicial punishment with no oversight from judges or juries,

which is, that's not good. No. And it's really widespread, not just in the United States, but around the world now. Yeah. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about how this all got started right after this.

Let's talk about how this all got started right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So, Chuck, I said earlier that this is an American invention, right? Yeah, it's actually American Quaker invention. Yeah. The Friends Society of Friends came up with the idea of solitary confinement first. And I feel like we talked about this in the prison episode too.

Yeah. The whole idea was that at the time, you might be put to labor or work or just left to hang around your fellow inmates in jail. And the idea behind solitary originally that the Quakers came up with was that you should be given time to reflect on your punishment in quiet solitude.

And the hope was that eventually you would become penitent and be redeemed. And that's where the word penitentiary came from to describe prisons. That's right. This is the late 18th century when they came up with it at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia.

Which sounds lovely. It does sound kind of like a nice place to be. I bet it wasn't. Flash forward a bit to the kind of early third of the 1800s in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. They said, you know what, we're going to try experimenting with how we deal with prisoners. And we're going to try this thing called lockdown.

They found that it didn't work very well. These inmates were socially dysfunctional. A lot of them killed themselves. And so in 1829, they abandoned it and said, this is not a good idea. Yeah, within the first 40 years of it being invented, they're like, no, we shouldn't be doing this to people. That's right.

And they went in favor of the Auburn State Prison and Upstate New York's method of putting people to hard labor. That became what you did when you got sent to prison rather than put into solitary. And they kept solitary around. They didn't go away entirely. Basically, every prison had a hole.

You get thrown in the hole. But you get thrown in the hole for days or weeks or something like that to punish you for something you did in the prison. Yeah, and they still say, like experts still say, it can be a useful tool in prison if you do put someone in there for three to five days. Or I think the UN says no more than two weeks.

15 days, I think, is what they came up with. Yeah, so the point is, is not to say like, I'm sure there are tons of people that say you shouldn't do it at all. But experts say that it can be a deterrent for poor behavior or whatever in prison. But people being in there for months and years is the issue at hand. So it was used sparingly, but it was still

around throughout the most of the 20th century. Alcatraz famously had D block, which was like a solitary block. But then on October 22, 1983, everything changed, and the current incarnation of the use of solitary confinement was born on that day at Marion Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois. So there were two different incidents

where prison guards were killed that day. Yes, it's not two separate things, right? Yeah. And the warden put the prison on lockdown and just kept it there. And what the warden basically invented in retaliation for these two murders on this day was what's now known as a super max prison.

It's where all of the prisoners are kept, ultimately, in isolation for 23 to 24 hours a day throughout the prison. And it's like a prison within a prison. Each inmate is in their own individual prison within the larger prison. And that's called super max prison. Yeah, and we talked about those a lot in the prison's episode.

These became not the new standard, because not all prisons are super max, but they became more widespread, for sure, through the 90s. Partially because of Bill Clinton in 1994, he signed the very famous crime bill, which, among other thing, I know it was famously known as the Three Strikes Bill. Well, yeah, that's what created the exploding prison population in large part.

Yeah, and Clinton, he still defends this as going a long way to alleviate crime, even like during this most recent election, he was being called out for it, and saying, like, this was a good thing. And the detractors still say, no, this is what started in a big, big way incarceration as a business model in this country.

Yeah, and apparently, the US now has 25% of the global prison population, but only 5% of the global population as a whole. That's really disproportionate. And apparently, we're second, at least on paper, to the Seychelles for the percentage of people in prison. Every 716 of every 100,000 people in the US is in prison. And in the Seychelles, it's 799 of every 100,000.

But Seychelles has a population of 92,000, so they kind of skews it. They think that the largest prison state really is North Korea, that it has a larger proportion of its population in prison than the US. So technically, the US would be number three, but we would just be trailing North Korea. It's not something you want to trail.

It's not a country that you want to be super close to as far as prison population percentages. No. So like we said before, there are even experts that say that solitary confinement can have a place in prison as a deterrent for bad behavior. And like I mentioned earlier, two separate things here. Bad behavior is one, but mentally ill.

We just don't have enough space. All these other reasons are the truly abhorrent ones. But like I said, deterrent is a big one. There is a lot of legitimacy to protecting prisoners from fellow prisoners. If they're at high risk for being injured or killed, that's legit. Obviously, if they're a danger, have attack guards

or other inmates, then a need for separation, like you can make a case there for sure. If they're prone to escape, maybe they need their own little room. I mean, that's one of the big ones that for proponents of super max prisons, that it's a prison within a prison. And they have to get out of that first prison,

and then they're still in the other prison. It just makes it much more difficult to get out. Yeah, I mean, you escape, and you go on and commit more crimes, murder someone while you're on the lam. You can definitely make an argument that keeping people like that, these repeat offenders or repeat escapee offenders in solitary. So those are some of the arguments for.

Yeah, and then I don't know if you said it already, but having that extra way to punish someone who's already in prison is another reason proponents say, you need to have this as a tool to kind of maintain order. Like if you legitimately run afoul of rules. Right. Or yeah, exactly. Because I mean, if you kill another inmate,

ostensibly you're going to go through trial again. But you could be executed for that. And that would be different than just being in prison. But if you weren't, then it's basically like, oh, you're in prison for life already, or we're going to add another life sentence onto that. You know, there's only so much you can do to someone who's in prison short of executing them.

And the solitary confinement proponent say provides that extra layer. Right, that deterrent. Right. And the reason it provides that extra deterrent, though, is because of the impact it has been shown to have on the mind of inmates. Yes.

And there's a few problems with this. Before we get into it, we should say there are very little studies. And one of the reasons why there are so few studies is because there is so little access to prisoners and solitary confinement by researchers. It's just not allowed. They're just kept out. Yeah, I saw a lot of these studies

were longitudinal studies about isolation of the elderly and the effect it can have on them. Well, there's a big worry I've seen that that's like the next health crisis is going to be loneliness and disconnectedness. But yeah, that's where they've gotten a lot of the data, because the prisoners are unavailable for study. They're in solitary.

And in that same vein, possibly disingenuously, the ones that have been able to be interviewed say they've gotten out of prison and now they're available to be interviewed, the proponents of solitary confinement say that the prisoners are just telling researchers what they think they want to hear. Or they're really playing up their story or whatever. But what they've found is that there

seems to be a basis for the idea that there are demonstrably negative impacts on mental health that are possibly permanent and irreversible, that comes from staying in solitary confinement for prolonged times. Yeah, I mean, there have been some studies. There was one on the Pelican Bay Prison in California. And it said people in solitary for long periods

suffer from depression, anxiety, apathy, hallucinations, panic attacks, paranoia. This is a big one, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, basically sound and light. Sometimes they're kept in the dark. Sometimes the light never goes off. So they have no sense of, no circadian rhythm of day or night. Which makes sleep extraordinarily difficult, too.

Apparently, prisoners who are in solitary will basically stay in bed all day. And then they don't sleep much at night. But they're not really getting good sleep during the day, either. So it's not like their circadian rhythm has flip-flopped. It's been spread out over the day rather than, which prevents them from getting actually real rest.

Because they're constantly at rest. What else? Difficulties, thinking, concentration, memory. They become angry and violent. They could suffer from dizziness. Heart palpitations, perspiration. Basically, like we were saying, zucosis, like you're trapped in this little box.

And it's not like, well, you can just read all day and educate yourself or something or paint. Well, in cases where they are, yes. Because a lot of times they're not given those things. Most times you're not allowed any form of stimulation or entertainment. So in plenty of cases you are, like you're still allowed, say, books or something like that.

But apparently one of the things you run into very quickly in solitary is you lose your taste for reading, even though that's all you have to do. Because you can't remember what you read a few pages previously. So you're having so many problems with your memory that you're not able to retain enough of what you're reading to make a book worthwhile.

So you just stop reading after a while. So where could this lead in a physical sense? They have done studies, and they show that if you're in solitary for extended periods, you have a higher rate of self-mutilation and suicide. They did one five-year study from 99 to 2004 in California, I think, in their whole prison system. And almost 50% of all inmate suicides

were committed by those in isolation. And see, that's a tough thing for someone who doesn't believe that isolation is a real problem. That's a tough one for them to just get rid of. Because the other stuff you can say, well, that's all self-reporting by a prisoner in solitary. So maybe they're just kind of making it up or playing it up. If they're mutilating themselves,

one guy mutilated his own genitalia, another person blinded himself, and then you have all of these completed or attempted suicides, those are hard numbers that you just can't ignore, that you would think people otherwise wouldn't do that if they weren't in solitary, or else the solitary population wouldn't represent such a high proportion of suicides and attempted suicides in the prison.

Yeah, they've also done studies for post-prison. In 2007 at the University of Washington, they said prisoners released directly from Supermax into the community committed crimes sooner than prisoners who had been transferred, even if only for a few months before release to a general prison population. Yeah, I saw that too. And I think the basis of that is that you

don't have social support or social stimulation from other people, right? Even if it's somebody you don't really like, if you're interacting with them, you're getting something from interacting with them, right? And one of the problems that you run into in solitary, apparently, is you start to focus on stuff. Very small things can become the basis

of raging anger and psychosis, because there's nobody there to tell you, that's not that big of a deal. Or man, just let it go. There's no one there to give you that social support to just let you talk you off the ledge. Yes, exactly. So the smallest thing can become something of immense importance.

And if it clicks with something like your rage, you're going to spend the indefinite time you're in solitary thinking about that one thing in stewing, like think about when you stew over something, right? And just how it gets harder and harder to let go the more you stew, you're just making that neural pathway stronger and stronger, thinking about it. Imagine having nothing but that to think about for years.

Apparently, it's a really bad side effect of solitary. And that comes from not having that social interaction with people to say, you're being weird. Well, and this is just me talking, but I imagine it doesn't increase your sense of empathy, because you gain empathy by interacting with people. So if you're released directly into the public at large, as you're being in Supermax, you just

don't have that normal day-to-day interaction with people, so you may be more likely to commit a crime, because you don't care about other people. That would be a pretty reasonable explanation of me. And then we'll take a break here in a second, but another big impact is simply the financial burden that taxpayers pay. And I went through this one academic paper on the cost,

and it really varies all over the place. But I'll just say 100% of the time, it costs a lot more money to how someone in solitary or a Supermax than a regular prison population. I mean, I've seen it all over the map. Our article says $58,000 a year for a regular and $78,000 per year. It's kind of all over the place,

but those are pretty in line. It's always a lot more money. Right, but I mean, how would you even keep track of that if different prisons have different definitions for solitary confinement? At the very least, we need to get this stuff standardized. This is step one. Yeah, yeah.

All right, well, let's take our final break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the rest of the world. And shall we touch on the Angola 3 case? Yeah. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so you said this is an American export. It does happen all over the world,

but there are countries, specifically England and some other European countries that have kind of seen the light in a way of reform. They rarely use it in England anymore. In the 1980s, they started kind of thinking about it and saying, you know what, maybe the thing to do is incentivize our most dangerous prisoners, give them a little bit more control,

and give them incentives for good behavior rather than just the threat of punishment for bad behavior. And they found that it worked. There was much less violence when they were housed in units of 10 people rather than being in those individual cells where they could earn privileges, like more contact with other people, more phone calls, more visits.

They found it had, they said the results have been impressive, the use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. So they found good results. And then it just seems like more and more states are enacting things like juveniles should never be in isolation, mentally ill should never be. Yeah, New York did.

I think just in the last couple of years even. I think Obama banned it in those two in federal prison as well, the mentally ill and the juveniles can't be, people under 21 can't be kept in solitary. Because apparently if it is having these pronounced effects on the brain, it would have even larger effects on the developing brain of a juvenile.

Absolutely. So that would be really bad. Yeah, that was the case I was talking about before with the NPR story. That kid, I think he was 16 at the time, 17 when it started the incarceration. And he was still developing. He said at the end, he said he was 21.

He felt like he was 40. And then like I said, he killed himself within a year after he got out, really sad. And this is, again, this is not some hardened criminal. He was never convicted of a crime. He was in pretrial holding. Is that clear? Who else?

This Juan Mendes, he's a UN, I've never heard of this title, a UN special rapporteur. Have you heard of that? It's fancy, yeah. What is that? It's like a special investigator. They're like, we want to know about this, so we're going to ask you to go out and find out everything

you can and give us a report. I think it's a reporter in French. Probably is. So you win. He presented a report in 2016 just last year to the General Assembly that basically said, there's a trend towards reform all over the world when it comes to solitary.

And the writing is kind of on the wall that this is, it's just making things worse. Yes, the thing is, though, is there is a lot of people who still say, especially inside bureaus of corrections, that say, no, this is not, you're all being played for fools. This is not a problem, and it's very useful. And there was actually a study by the Colorado Bureau

of Corrections, Department of Corrections, one of the two. They funded it, or one of their researchers carried it out. And it found that the mental health of inmates can actually improve in solitary confinement. And everyone was like, isn't it strange that this is the only study that has ever found anything like that? It was funded by the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado.

And the methodology has been attacked as a very controversial study. But what gets me is that critics of the study have used the same criticism that critics of the studies that show solitary confinement is problematic used, which is they said that the prisoners were just telling the researchers what they think they wanted to hear, which is like, yeah, I'm doing great.

I've actually thought about how bad my crime was. So you could probably let me out now. Right. You know? So that study, I didn't read the study. But from what I understand, there's flaws to it. And it's the only one that came up with that. You'd think that if the Bureau of Corrections

had come up with something substantial, every state prison system would be running the same tests to find out and to back up their case, right? You know who's really big on this is David Simon, the guy who created the wire. He is kind of, and you know what? We should finish, I don't know if it'll be the last one,

but we should totally do one on private prisons. We touched on that a little bit in prisons, but that deserves its own show. Agreed. That's sort of one of his big things. He's, I guess what you would call it, a passion project now. And he's a super smart guy. Like hearing an interview with him is really, really interesting.

But yeah, this is kind of one of the things he's dedicating his work to now is exposing these for-profit prisons and incarceration as an industry in the United States. He just testified in front of Congress recently, right? Oh, really? I think so. Wouldn't surprise me.

Should we talk about the Angola 3 case a little bit? Yes, please. So our House of Works article starts with an intro about a man named Albert Woodfox. And he was one of the infamous Angola 3 from Angola, Louisiana State Prison, which is known as the bloodiest prison in the South. And originally, these three men, Albert Woodfox, Herman

Wallace, and Robert King, were sent to prison for armed robbery. And once they got in there, they started a Black Panther chapter within prison and tried to expose some of the atrocities going on in prison, how they were treated, what was going on with the guards. And that was not a popular move, to say the least. Right. So they did things like hunger strikes, work strikes,

started to get a lot of attention in the 1970s, calling for investigations. And so Angola said, you guys are going in solitary forever. Yeah, apparently that's something that it's commonly used for as well, is to squash dissent or criticism of the prison system or the prison rules. It's pretty awful.

It is, so Albert Woodfox, who was kind of the focus of this article that I read, he was in prison and solitary for 45 years. And they're not positive, but they think that he is the person who was in solitary confinement the longest in the United States. Right. 45 years, dude.

I know. The fact that he's out and walking talking is pretty insane. There's another one of his buddies, or at least fellow inmates, is still in lockdown in Angola and has been since, I think, the 80s, right? Yeah, this wasn't one of the Angola three. But it was a guy named George Gibson, and he is in Angola. Yeah.

He's been in lockdown since 1982. Yeah, and these are six by, I mean, not like 8 by 10 is big. Right. But these were six by nine foot cells. This is crazy. And here's the thing. They were, if you look at the evidence, there's a lot of documentaries and very famous cases.

They were essentially put in lockdown to squash this descent. But what they were officially put in for was for killing a prison guard. Right. But according to most people, that did not happen. It was not them. There were so many inconsistencies or obfuscations. There were missteps.

There was a bloody print at the murder scene that didn't match any of these guys. They never compared that bloody handprint to, or was it a handprint or a footprint? I used to print. I would just handprint them. They never compared that to any of the other prisoners and that had access to potentially kill this guard.

And there were very few people that even could have done this. It's not like it was the whole prison population. There was DNA evidence that could have freed them that was conveniently lost by prison officials. They had plenty of alibi witnesses that had nothing to gain. Like they didn't get an exchange for anything, like good behavior or to get more free time.

Right. They said these guys weren't anywhere near the murder scene at the time, these other prisoners. And their main witness, Hezekiah Brown, basically in retrospect, everyone says this guy lied under oath so he could get more privileges. He was a serial rapist serving life and he agreed to testify in exchange for more cigarettes,

birthday cakes, TV time. Another birthday cake was kind of an interesting perk. And the warden later on, when he was reminiscing in this documentary, the warden of the prison said, Hezekiah was one of these guys where you could put words in his mouth. And so there were essentially enough doubt to where the family members of the guard that was killed

said we don't think these guys did it and we want to find out who did it. And eventually they were all freed for different reasons. One of them, Herman was freed because despite all this misconduct in the investigation and the trial and constitutional violations and racism, he was eventually freed because they excluded women from one of his trials, which is a violation

of the 14th Amendment, which was interesting. And he died three days after he got out of cancer, I know. That's awful. Very tragic. Albert was finally released, but not because of, I don't know, I'm sorry, Albert was not released because of continued practicing of Black pantherism, they called it.

That's not even a real thing. You can't make that up. You can't keep somebody in there for, that what? Yeah, and then finally in 2016, after 43 years and 10 months, I think we said 45 years, Albert was released from isolation and from prison, which is, I'm sure there's a movie in the works about these guys. But again, there was no transition process, right?

He was just in solitary confinement one day and then the next day he's out of prison. Not just out of solitary, out of prison. And from the research I've run across, if you are in solitary, you are more likely to commit a crime. You are less able to identify with other people. And if the point of prison is to rehabilitate people, or at the very least, to not release them

until they're ready to be rejoined society, then solitary confinement is the antithesis of that. You're stripping someone of their humanity and their ability to relate to humanity on a physiological, neurological level. So it runs contrary to our ideas of prisons. Yeah, and if you're thinking, what about the Eighth Amendment? Cruel and unusual punishment, it seems like in many cases

like an open and shut kind of thing. But there's never been a ruling on that. No, the courts said, pfft, not today, I'm not in the mood today. Maybe some other day. Because after all, who cares about the inmates, right? They're inmates, they're criminals. Right. If you want to know more about inmates and criminals

in solitary confinement, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, a quick correction first. It's called World Geography with Josh, part two. I get it wrong a lot. I need to just sit there and check out maps. Well, I'm the worst at World Geography, but.

But you love maps. I do love maps, which is weird. I think I just, I don't talk about it because I know I'm not good at it. I got you. So in our famine episode, I think you said, what were the two countries, Botswana and Ethiopia? Yeah.

We're neighboring. Next door. They're not. A few thousand miles apart. There's a couple thousand, not a few thousand. All right, so we like to correct things we get wrong. And another thing we got wrong in Jess was when we did our listener mail from Australia

with the Aussie lingo. Yeah, surely the Australians got that we were joking, right? I don't think so. Wow, we got a lot of response saying, guys, you got it so wrong. Yeah, they kind of exasperated like, how did you, how'd you get it this wrong? We were just kidding around.

Yeah, we knew we were wrong on that stuff. Where's that famous Australian sense of humor? But I'm going to read this one from Matt just because it's the first one that came up on my phone. Because it didn't have one prepared. You're like the assassin and no country for old men. It's all about fate. What a great movie.

So officially, Matt says, Makas is McDonald's. Didn't know that. That's not true. He said it rhymes with Packers, Green Bay Packers. So Mackers, I guess. Bottle-O is where you buy alcohol. It's wrong. Servo, Chuck, you got it right.

It was a petrol station. OK, maybe that one. Duries are cigarettes run to the curries. Also called darts or cancer sticks. Wrong. Pist is drunk. We know that. I don't know what you said in jest.

I thought your bit was really funny. It wasn't that funny. I wasn't very happy with myself. It could have been way funnier. I thought it was good. Although he says Pist is drunk enough to not drive. I don't know what that means in Australia. I don't know where that line is.

Because you veer off the road, you're just in the outback. As long as you have some water in your trunk, you're fine. A stubby is a beer. It's specifically a 375 milliliter bottle of beer. 375 is a pint. It's a pint. Why don't you just call it a pint? He said it's also a style of tradesmen workshorts

with a pocket big enough to hold a bottle of beer. We call those cargo shorts. Yeah, or beer shorts. A slab is a case of beer, which is 24 of stubbies. VB plus stubbies means from Victoria, like me. Victoria bitter beer is VB. Fosters also is probably Victorian from the Carleton United Breweries.

Carleton. As is Melbourne Brewery. Fact, the first ever artificial ice created was to make beer cold in Australia. What? Interesting. And he says, by the way, there's a lot of Aussie slang that is not relevant in travel books.

I read them myself and laugh as nobody in Australia talks that way. It's a big fat joke that every Aussie convinces foreigners. Danger is Gert, G-U-R-T. Steer clear of Gert. Drop bears, hoop snakes, and yawies. I didn't even know what's going on now. I think a hoop snake.

That's another name for a hookworm. OK, what's a drop bear? The drop bear is your fecal material containing hookworm eggs. And yawies? That's what you say when you drop a hoop bear. We're getting a famous poopslinging fight. Right.

Boy, I could see how this could be an endless cycle of emails forever and ever. Let's keep it going, kind of like a hookworm life cycle. The above written is true today as your contributor wrote, no trademarks involves, as far as I know, stubby workshorts origin might be contested. And that is from Matt. Thanks, Matt.

What does Matt mean in Australian? That's how you wipe your feet before you enter a dwelling. OK. Thanks, Matt. If you want to get in touch with us like Matt did, you can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. I'm also at JoshClarke. Check me out.

You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook or CharlesWChuckBriant and at StuffYouShouldKnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.