Activists are celebrating a major blow to the prison industrial complex and the U.S.’s globally condemned system of mass incarceration. On Sept. 1, 2015, a federal judge finally announced a settlement in a lawsuit challenging California’s cruel and protracted use of solitary confinement in a case that had dragged on for 2 years.

Prison authorities in the state have long relied on the barbaric practice of near complete isolation of a significant fraction of prisoners based on supposed gang-affiliation. According to Amnesty International, “No other state is believed to have held so many prisoners for such long periods in indefinite isolation.” As a result of the settlement, thousands of inmates will now be released into the general prison population where they will be able to meet their basic human needs of social interaction. Most importantly, the 78 California inmates who have been isolated for an unimaginable 20 plus years will now find relief.

One of those 78 inmates, a man named Todd Ashker, was the lead plaintiff in the newly settled lawsuit. Ashker has spent 25 years in solitary confinement at the notorious Pelican Bay State Prison.

In an interview on Uprising, I recently spoke with the sister of another inmate who spent even longer in a Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at the same prison as Ashker. Of his 30 years in prison, Cruz Gallegos’ brother, Victor, spent 26 years in solitary confinement.

“He was told that he was a threat, that somebody anonymous said that he was a threat to prisoners and that’s why he was housed in SHU,” said Victor’s sister. To be caged in a box and essentially forgotten for such a trivial reason is mind-boggling. As Atul Gawande wrote in The New Yorker, “simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.” Gallegos’ brother was denied that interaction for 26 years.

Studies of what solitary confinement does to human brains show definitive degeneration of basic abilities. In a 2006 paper published in the Journal of Law and Policy, Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Board Certified Psychiatrist with decades of experience at Harvard Medical School, asserted that solitary confinement “can cause severe psychiatric harm,” and that “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium.” In 2011, United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture Juan Méndez issued a report warning that solitary confinement “can amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and even torture.”

And so for over 26 years Victor Gallegos remained in such conditions, only interacting with his family members during visits through a pane of thick glass and conversing over a phone. Through her tears, Gallegos explained to me what the prolonged isolation has meant for her brother: “Twenty-six years of loneliness, not having somebody to touch or somebody to caress him or give him some kind of affection, ’cause that’s not allowed.”

Pelican Bay State Prison’s SHUs have no windows, which means that for 26 years Victor never saw the sun or the moon. Recently he was transferred out of solitary to the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi where he finally began interacting with other prisoners and was exposed, even if in a limited manner, to sunlight and fresh air. “He was very excited to get a cell with a window,” said Gallegos. “At night, when he was looking out he couldn’t tell what he was looking at. It was the moon. He hadn’t seen the moon in so many years he didn’t recognize it at first. ”

“He’s very sensitive to noise,” said Gallegos of the lingering effects of solitary. “If we’re talking he thinks we’re talking too loud. He has to keep turning around to see who’s behind him. He hears people’s voices and turns around to see where the noise is coming from.” Shamefully, the US has led the world in the use of solitary confinement as a tactic to subdue prisoners. Flowery sounding language by Secretary of State John Kerry on the State Department’s website gives lie to U.S. hypocrisy on human rights:

The fundamental struggle for dignity has been a driving force in human history worldwide, and what drives us toward it is a set of universal values and aspirations. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are ideals that cannot be contained by national boundaries or ocean shores. That is why it is especially troubling that so many people in so many places face grotesque restrictions on their freedoms and rights from their own governments.

Indeed, it ought to trouble Americans that the most “grotesque” of restrictions are found inside U.S. prisons. The majority of inmates nationwide who are subjected to solitary confinement are in California. But while that state’s use of the torturous practice has been curbed, most other states continue to rely on it. The U.N. Rapporteur on Torture called out the U.S. alongside countries like Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Belarus for subjecting prisoners to solitary confinement.

The legal victory that now limits the use of prisoner isolation in California belongs to the inmates and their families. Two years ago, about 30,000 prisoners across California (Victor Gallegos included), which was about two-thirds of all inmates in the state, undertook a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement. It was considered the largest prisoner hunger strike in the state’s history, and possibly in world history. The strike was reported widely in the international news media, shedding light on the otherwise invisible suffering of California inmates. Gallegos also credited the activism of inmates’ families outside the prison walls.

“We are their voices. It’s very important for us to let the world know, to let the public know, what California prisons are doing, how they’re torturing them,” said Gallegos.

The group that Gallegos is a member of, California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC), worked in tandem with such lawyers groups as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to reach the historic settlement.

“I’ve waited so many years for this day,” said Gallegos. “I thought he would never get out of Pelican Bay. I thought, if he did get out, it was going to be in a box.”

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of Uprising, a daily radio program at KPFK Pacifica Radio. She is also the Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S.-based nonprofit that supports women’s rights activists in Afghanistan and co-author of “Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence.”

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