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“Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement....”
― Andre Agassi, Open

“In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.”
― Peter Straub

“[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!”
― Megan Sweeney, The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading

“It’s not the physical things that you’re without that make it so hard to be incarcerated for life. It’s the fact that you’re helpless to take care of your family when they’re sick, to raise your children, to help in their times of struggle, and to give back to your community. Instead you’re a burden, a charity case, someone to pity. It strips you of your self-esteem and your self-respect.”
― Jean Casella, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement

“Racial violence has been rationalized, legitimated, and channeled through our criminal justice system; it is expressed as police brutality, solitary confinement, and the discriminatory and arbitrary imposition of the death penalty.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Solitary confinement is one of the punishments most dreaded even by prisoners hardened to physical brutality, and is now a notorious procedure for inducing political compliance. (Conversely, the best of the known weapons against compliance is social organization.)”
― Eric Berne, Games People Play

“In fact, the whole place was filled with little conflicts like this: beautiful next to disgusting, free next to confined, compassion next to torture, death next to life.”
― Margee Kerr, Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear

“Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expiredâ€�.He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of yearsâ€�.

And though he lives to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter night there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.”
― Charles Dickens

“She held out, did not speak directly to her captors except to curse them. She offered no cooperation. There were moments when she did not know why she resisted. What would she be giving up if she answered her captors' questions? What did she have to lose beyond misery, isolation, and silence? Yet she held out.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

“Bahr sang in Arabic, Pashto, Persian, and English, but even if our brothers or the guards didn't understand the words, his voice was enough to free us all from our caged lives, even if only for a moment. Music and poetry are the soul's languages, and when Bahr sang, all the blocks quieted down so they could listen. His voice and his songs carried with me into solitary confinement, where I listened to Bahr and the sea in my head.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“The Angola 3: targeted, framed, isolated.”
― Gordon Roddick

“The Angola 3. Another prisoner confessed to the killing, and when Robert and his fellow detainee were questioned and told to shut up. The judge then ordered them to be gagged with duck tape and bound. All this happened in front of a jury who sat there aghast.”
― Gordon Roddick

“The Angola 3. Held in Solitary confinement for 40+ years each. The Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) block, where Herman and Albert were imprisioned, housed solitary cases on two tiers, with around 13 cells per tier. The cells were no more than nine by six feet, and prisoners were confined 23 hours a day, only getting out for a shower or solo exercise in the yard. Imagine, for a minute, being forced to live in your bathroom for the rest of your life.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Frame it up fact by fact. Build it up to show the injustice.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Solitary confinement is torture.”
― Gordon Roddick

“The Angola 3 had an invincible spirit.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Justice for the Angola 3.”
― Gordon Roddick