Solitary Confinement: Cruel and Unusual

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, So get on board the dry pod train. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is Stuff you

should know. Crime and Punishment Party eight Yeah, yeah, and a lot of stuff on this And I thought we've 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 listen recently. You're just making assumption now, I just remember it being a good one. It stands out. It's one of our good ones. Uh,

this is um, you know, a little more robust. Look, it's 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 twenty three hours a day. Not good for you as a human right, And a lot of people are going so far as to say this, this constitutes

cruel and in human punishment. Yeah, it's kind of like zukosis for humans. We talked about that in Our Zoo's episode. Yeah, um, 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. Let's probably do that for like a half hour. No, they wouldn't give you a baseball. Oh that's true. You know, there's nothing funny you're cute about it right, um, all right, shall we Yeah, that's

so solitary. It is a huge controversial thing right now because some 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 um. Other people say, no, this is cool and in human, like we said, regardless of how you slice it is 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 Stuff Works article, they you know, call it like lockdown, restrictive housing, segregation, isolation. But I saw a lot more uh creative names that prisons use that you know, try to shine it up

a bit as something other than what it is. Right, But in what it is, no matter what you call it is, it's confining a prisoner to a relatively small cell um I saw usually eight by ten or less. And I also saw that frequently compared to a horse stable, in which comparison the um the prison cell actually comes out the smaller of the two and you confine that and this is the key you can find that person to that small selfer between twenty three and twenty four

hours a day every day. Yeah, well I think twenty They like some people never leave. It depends on the day. So uh, in some cases you'll be confined like that for twenty three hours a day and then one hour a day you get out to exercise and um shower. But maybe that's just on week days. So a weekend you would be in there for forty eight straight hours

or longer. If the guard doesn't like you or is in a bad mood, they might just not let you out that day, right, And we don't want to paint corrections officers, as you know, the movies do a good enough job of demonizing them. Yeah, And if you look into the 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, you know. So, like it's it's a it's a 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, Um, we don't want to 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. Uh, 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 uh, anyway, we're not gonna do that. But that does still happen, you know. There. That's why prison reform is still a thing, because there's still is a lot of abuse that happens in certain prisons and among certain prison guards and uh, correctional officers.

So uh, it's certainly not something that's been solved. Uh. 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 we should say the whole point of solitary is to limit human contact as much as possible. Yeah, so even though you are maybe interacting with a guard here there, it's when they slide your meal in three times a day, and that's it. You don't see people. You um, you exercise alone. Everything you're

doing is alone. And that's the point. That's why they call it solitary confinement. It is uh. So there's a couple of types of segregation that can happen. One's called

disciplinary segregation. That is uh pretty obvious you have done something that has run a foul of the prison rules um, which can range from legitimate things like you know, you start a fight, or you attacked another inmate or you know what, caught with an extra honey bun maybe so, or you you stole something um too a little more petty things and that's where that's where materia 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 got to the hole for thirty days, right, Or maybe somebody um snitched on you and you were framed clearing clearing simple, right. So that's disciplinary segregation. There's also administrative segregation,

and this is UM. 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 you know Basically they're trying to protect uh supposedly trying to protect the prisoner from harm. Yeah, by isolating them from the population. Yeah, but whether they whether they want to stay in the regular population or not, that decisions made for them, right,

And that's just one type of administrative Um. 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. Uh, with overcrowding, that's obviously a big deal. Um, pre trial you can go in if you're not even convicted of a crime yet, this 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. Uh. There's a documentary on Spike TV called the Calif 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 this guy, Calif Browder um, when he was I think he was sixteen at the time, UM, stole a backpack from a party. He and his buddy get uh get I don't. I don't know if they're in a car, got pulled over, but they get arrested.

They let the one guy go, but Calif Browder had a prior charge, so they kept him for more than three years in uh the Rikers Island Jail complex, and a lot of that was in solitary confinement, confinement, and this before like 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

lessening year after. And it's just one of the geez one of the more egregious and sad examples of just how broken the system can be here in the United States.

The the another UM way that it's being used that's just as egregious as pre trial UM in my opinion, is to house the mentally ill right after after the eighties, when Reagan closed down the massive institutions that had become like huge places of abuse of the mentally ill in favor of um 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, UM, 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 of mental illness,

it can be a death sentence for you. Yeah, and uh in the United States, UM, they don't have exact numbers because uh, it's just you know, states vary and what they consider confinement solitary confinement. UM. Not a lot of prisons want to participate in studies. There's no reporting, not very much, you know. UM, but I have the impression, Chuck, that you could be like a congress person saying like I want to tour your solitary wing and you would get turned out. There's like that level of um self

administration by the Bureau of Corrections inside prisons. Yeah. So the number very but UM basically most people say up to a hundred thousand inmates in the United States, And again, not all of these are in prison. Some of them are in jail, some of them or in uh uh immigrant temporary immigrant housing uh are kept in isolation. And Um, there isn't a You don't go before a court to get put in the whole 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. All that is talk back. I've been in here for six months because the guard has a problem with me. Um, 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 that's not good. 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, so Chuck I said earlier that this is an American invention, right, It's actually an American Quaker invention. 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 two. The whole idea was that, Um, at the time, you know you might be put to to labor or work or um 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 and 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 eighteenth 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. Uh. Flash forward a bit to the kind of early third of the eighteen hundreds and eighteen twenty nine Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. They said, you know what, we're gonna try experimenting with how we deal with prisoners, and we're gonna

try this thing called lockdown. Uh. They found that it didn't work very well. These inmates were socially dysfunctional, a lot of them killed themselves, and so in eighteen twenty nine they abandoned it and said, this is not a good idea Yeah, within the first forty years of it being invented, they're like, no, we shouldn't be doing this

to people. And they went in favor of the Auburn State Prison and Upstate New York's method of putting people the hard labor that became the the um the what you what you did when you got sent to prison, rather than put into solitary, and they kept solitary around like you didn't go away entirely, Like basically every prison had a hole. You get thrown in the hole, but you get thrown in the hole for like 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 u N says no more than two weeks, fifteen days, I think is what they came up with. Yeah, So you know, the point is is not to say like, well, I mean, 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 you know, 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 twentieth century. Alcatraz famously had D Block, which was like a solitary block. Um. But then on October twenty everything changed in the current incarnation of the use of solitary confinement was born on that day at Marian Prison, Marian 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 um, the the warden put the prison on lockdown and just kept it there. And what the warden basically invented in 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 twenty three to twenty four hours a day, uh, 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 Prisons episode. These became uh uh not the new standard because you know, not all prisons of super max. But they became more widespread for sure through the nineties, um partially because of Bill Clinton in he signed the very famous crime Bill, which, among other things and 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 um going a long way to alleviate crime. Uh, even like during this most recent election he was being called out for it and and saying like this was, you know, a good thing, and um, the detractors still say, no, this is what started in a big, big way incarceration

as as a business model in this country. Yeah. And apparently the US now has twent of the global prison population but only five percent of the global population as a whole. Yeah, that's really disproportionate. And apparently we're second at least on paper to the Seychelles um for the percentage of people in prison. Every seven hundred sixteen of every hundred thousand people in the US is in prison, and in the Seychells it's seven of every hundred thousand.

But stay shells as a population of so that kind of excuse it. And they think that the largest prison state really is um North Korea that it has a larger port proportion of its population in prison the US. So technically the U s would be number three, but we would just be trailing North Korea. It's not something you want to trail. It's not not a country that you want to be super close to as far as

like prison population percentages. No. Um. 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. UM. And like I mentioned earlier, two separate things here. Bad behavior is one, but you know, mentally ill, we just don't have enough space. Um. You know all these other reasons of the truly abhorrent ones. UM. But like I said,

deterrent is a big one. UM. There there is a lot of legitimacy to protecting UM prisoners from fellow prisoners. They're at high risk for being injured or killed, that's legit obviously. If they're a danger, you know, have attacked guards or other inmates, then uh a need for separation, like you can make a case you know there for sure, Um, if they're prone to escape, yeah, maybe they need their

own little room. I mean, that's that's one of the big ones that for for proponents of super max prisons that like this is 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 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 are on the lamb Uh.

You can definitely make an argument that keeping people like that, um, these repeat offenders or repeat escape e offenders in solitary.

So those are some of the arguments for Yeah. And then I I don't know if you said it already, but that 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 a foul of rules or yeah, like yeah, exactly, because I mean, if you if you kill another inmates, sensibly you're going to go through trial again, but the you know that you could be executed for

for that, and that would be different than just being in prison. But if you weren't, then that's basically like, oh, you're in prison for life. Already, Well we're gonna add another life sentence onto that, you know, Like, there's only so much you can do to someone who's in prison short of executing them. Uh, And the solid solitary confinement,

proponents say provides that extra layer, 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. And there's a few problems with this. Before we get into it, we should say there's they're very little studies. And one of the reasons why there there are so few studies is because there's so little access to prisoners in 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 like 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. Um. But yeah, that's that's where they've gotten a lot of the data because the the prisoners are unavailable for study

there in solitary and in that same vein possibly disingenuously. Um. The ones that have been able to be interviewed say they've gotten out of prison and now they're available to be interviewed. Um. The proponents of um SO of solitary confinement say that the prisoners are just they're just telling researchers what they think they want to hear, or they're

really playing up their story or whatever. But what they found is that there 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, Uh, people in solitary for long periods, uh, suffer from depression, anxiety, apathy, hallucinations, panic attacks, paranoia. Um, this is a big one. Hypersensitivity external stimuli basically sound and light. Right. Uh. Sometimes they're

kept in the dark. Sometimes the light never goes off, so they you know, have no sense of you know, no circadian rhythm of day or night, which makes sleep extraordinarily difficult to 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 the circadian rhythm has flip flopped. It's been spread out over the day rather than um so which prevents it from

getting actually real rest because they're constantly at rest. Uh. What else difficulties UM thinking, concentration, memory, UM, they become angry and violent, they could suffer from dizziness, UM, heart palpitations, perspiration. Basically like we're saying, zukosis, 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. And in cases where they are, yes, because a lot

of times they're not given those things. But most time you're you're not allowed any form of stimulation or entertainment. So in in plenty of cases you are, like, you're

still allowed to 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 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 stopped reading after a while. Wow. Uh so where could this lead in

a physical sense? Um? 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. Um. They did one five year study from two thousand four in California, I think, in their whole prison system, and almost fifty of all inmate suicides were committed by those in isolation. And see, that's a tough thing for someone who who uh doesn't believe that that that isolation is a real problem. That's a that's a 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. Um, and then you have all of these um completed or attempted suicides. Uh. Those are like 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, you know. Yeah, they've also done studies for post prison uh in two thousand seven at the University of Washington, they said prisoners released directly from supermax into the community committed crime sooner than prisoners who have been transferred, even if only for

a few months before release to a general prison population. Yeah, I saw that too, And the 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 like raging anger and psychosis and um, because there's nobody there to tell you like, 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 to just let you talk off the ledge exactly, So the smallest thing can become something of immense important and if it, if it clicks with something like your rage, you're gonna space in the indefinite time you're in solitary thinking about that one thing and stewing, Like think about when you stew over something, right, and 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 you gain

empathy by interacting with people. So if you're released directly into the public at large etter being in super max, you just don't have that 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 It's it's a pretty reasonable explanation to me. Uh, and then you know, we'll take a break here in a second. But another a big impact is simply the

financial burden that taxpayers pay it. And I went through this one uh uh paper academic paper on the cost, and it's really varies all over the place. But I'll just say one of the time, it costs a lot more money to house someone in solitary or super max than a regular prison population. I mean, I've seen it kind of all over the map. Our article says, uh fifty eight thousand dollars a year for a regular seventy eight grand per year. It's kind of all over the place,

but those are pretty in line. It's it's always a lot more money. But I mean, how would you even keep track of that if if different prisons have different definitions for you know, solitary confinement. At the very least, we need to get this stuff standardized. This step one yeah, yeah, Um, all right, let's take our final break and uh we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the rest of the world. And um, shall we touch on

the angle of three case? All right, so you said this is a American export, Um, it does happen all over the world, but there are countries, UH, specifically England and some other European countries that have UM kind of seen the light uh in a way of reform. UM.

They rarely use it in England anymore. UH. In the nineteen eighties they started kind of thinking about it and saying, you know what, maybe either thing to do is is incentivized are 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. Um. There was much less violence uh when they were housed in units of ten people rather than being in those individual cells where they could earn privileges like ah, more contact with other people, more phone calls, more visits. UH. They found it had UH. They said, the results have been impressive. The use of long term isolation in England is now negligible. So they found good results. UH. And then it just seems like more and more states UM are enacting things like uh

like juveniles should never be in isolation. I think I should never be. Yeah New York did I think just in the last couple of years, even I think Obama abandoned in those two in federal prison as well mentally ill in the um. Yeah, juveniles can't be People under twenty one 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 that would be really bad. Yeah, that was the case I was talking about before with the the NPR story. That kid. I think he was sixteen at the time, seventeen when it started the incarceration, and he was still developing. He said. At the end he said he was twenty one, he felt like he was forty and then you know, like I said, he killed himself within a year after he got out. Really sad. And this is again, this is not some hard and criminal.

He was never convicted of a crime. Right, he was in pre trial holding, right? Is that clear? Uh? Who else this? Juan mindez Um, he's a u N I've never heard of this title? Are un special? Yeah? Have you heard of that? It's fancy? Yeah, what is that? It's like a special investigator there, Like we we want to know about this, So we're gonna ask you to go out and find out everything you can and give us a report. I think it's a reporter in French,

so you win. Uh. He presented a report in sixteen, 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 it's just making things worse. Yes. The thing is, though, is there's a lot of people who still say, especially inside UM Bureaus of Corrections, that say, no, this is not you. You're all being played for fools. This is not a problem,

and it's very useful. And there was actually a study UM by the Colorado Bureau of Corrections Department of Corrections, one of the two UM they they funded it or one of their researchers carried it out, and it found that UM that the mental health of inmates can actually improve in solitary confinement. And everyone was like, that isn't it's strange that this is the only study that has ever found anything like that. It's it was funded by the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado UM, 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 UM studies that show solitary confinement is problematic used, which is they they said that the reason the prisoners were just telling the researchers what they think they wanted to hear, which is like, I'm doing great. I've actually thought about how how how bad my crime was, so you could probably let me

out now, you know, so that that that study. I didn't read the study, but from what I understand, it's it's there's flaws to it, and it's the only one that came up with that. You think that if if the Bereau of Corrections had come up with something substantial, every state prison system would be running the same tests to find now and to back up their case. Right. You know who's really big on this is uh David Simon,

the guy who created the wire. He is uh kind of and and you know what we should finish well, I don't know if it will be the last one, but we should totally do one on private prisons. Um. We touched on that a little bit in Prisons, but that deserves its own show. That's sort of one of his big um things. He's Uh, I guess what you'd call it a passion project now is trying to and he's super smart guy. Like hearing an interview with him

is really really interesting. But uh, yeah, it's kind of one of the things he's dedicating us work two 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, so it wouldn't surprise me. Um, should we talk about the Angola three case a little bit? Yes? Please?

So our house Stuff Works article starts with an intro about a man named Albert Wood Fox and he was one of the infamous Angola Three from Angola, Louisiana State Prison,

which is known as the bloodiest prison in the South. Uh. And originally these three men, Albert wood Fox, 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 retreated what

was going on with the guards. And that was not a popular move to say the least, So, uh, they did things like hunger strikes, work strikes started to get a lot of attention in the nineteen seventies calling for an investigations and so and Gola said, you guys are going in solitary UM forever. Yeah, apparently that's that's something that is commonly used for as well as to squash dissent or criticism of the prison system or the prison rules. Yeah,

that's pretty awful. It is so UM Albert wood Fox, who was kind of the focus of this article that I read, he was in prison, UH in solitary for forty five 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 forty five years. Dude. I know, the fact that he's out and walking talking

is pretty insane. There's another one of his um, his buddies or at least fellow inmates, UH is still in in lockdown UM in Angola and has been since I think the eighties, right, Yeah, I don't This wasn't one of the Angola three, but it was a guy named George Gibson and he is an Angola. Yeah, he's been in lockdown since. And these are six by I mean not like eight by ten is big, but these were six by nine ft cells. And UM, here's the thing

they were. You know, if you look at the evidence, there's a lot of documentaries and um, I mean, you know, 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. Um. But according to most people, that did not happen. It was not them. Uh. 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. Uh. They never compare that bloody handprint too or was it a handprint or a footprint I had to print? They never compared that to any of the other prisoners and that were 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. Uh. There was DNA evidence that could have freed them that was conveniently

lost by prison officials. Uh. They had plenty of alibi witnesses that had nothing to gain, Like they didn't get an exchange, uh for for anything like good behavior to get more free time. They said, these guys weren't anywhere near the murder scene at the time. These other prisoners and their main witness, Hezekiah Brown Uh. 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 an exchange for more cigarettes, birthday cakes TV time and the birthday cakes was kind

of interesting. Bert Uh 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 they 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. They were all freed for different reasons.

One of them, Herman, was freed because despite all this misconduct in the investigation, in the trial Uh and constitutional violations and racism, he was eventually freed because they excluded women um from one of his trials, which is a violation of the fourteenth Amendment, which was interesting. And he died three days after he got out of cancer I know, very tragic. Uh. Albert was finally released h um, but not because of uh, I'm sorry. Albert was 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 two sixteen, after forty three years and ten months I think we said forty five years, um, Albert was released, uh 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 confined one day and then the next day he's out of prison, not just out of solitary, out of prison. And from what I've from from what the research I've run across, it's if you were 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 um not release them until they're they're ready to be rejoint society, yeah, 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, that seems like and many cases like an open and shut kind of thing.

But um, there's never been a ruling on that. Now the courts said not today, and in the mood today, here's some other day, because after all, who cares about the inmates, right? Their inmates, their criminals. Uh. If you want to know more about inmates and criminals and solitary confinement, you can type those words in the search part how stuff works dot com. Since I said search parts, time for listener mail. All right, a quick correction first. Um,

it's called World Geography with Josh Part two. I get a wrong a lot. Uh just sit there and check out maps. Well, I'm the worst world geography, 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 any good at it. Uh So in our famine episode, I think you said, what were the two countries Botswana and Ethiopia. Yeah, we're neighbor, they're not a

few thousand miles apart. A couple of thousand, not a few thousand, all right, So we like the correct things we get wrong. Um. And another thing we got wrong in Jess was, um, when we did our listener mail from Australia with the Assie lingo. Yeah, surely the Australians got that we were joking, right, I don't think so. We got a lot of response saying guys, you got it so wrong. Yeah, they like kind of exasperated, like, how did you how did you get it this wrong?

We were just kidding around. Yeah, we knew we were wrong on that stuff. Where is that famous Australian sense of humor? But um, I'm gonna 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 Minton. It's all about fake What a great movie. Um. So officially, Matt says Marca's is McDonald's. Didn't know that. That's not true. He said it rhymes with packers, Green Bay packers, so macers,

I guess bottle. Oh is where you buy alcohol. That's wrong? Uh, servo, chuck, You got it right. It was a petrol station. Okay, maybe that one. Dirries or cigarettes round to the curries, also called darts or cancer sticks. Wrong, Piste is drunk, we know that. I don't know what you said in jest. 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. Um. Although he says Piste is drunk enough to not drive, I don't know what that means in Australia. I know where that line is because you veer off the road. You're just in the outback. As long as you have some water and you're drunk, you're fine. A stubby is a beer. It's specifically a three hundred and seventy five millilite a bottle of beer. Three pint. It's a pint, okay, Why why don't you just call it a pint? He said.

It's also a style of Tradesmen work shorts with a pocket big enough to hold a bottle of beer. We call those cargo shorts or beer shorts. Um. A slab is a case of beer, which is twenty four of stubbies. Okay, um v B plus stubbies means from Victoria, like me, Victoria bitter beer is a vb um Foster's also it's probably Victorian from the Carlton United Breweries Carlton as his Melbourne brewery. Uh. In 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 travel books. I read them myself and laugh as nobody in Australia talks that way. It's a big fat joke that every Aussie can convince his foreigners. Danger is girt, g u r t ste. You're clear of girt, drop bears, hoop snakes and yawi's I didn't even know what's going on now. I think a hoop snake if that's another name for hookworm. Okay, what's a drop bear? The drop bear is the it's

your fecal material containing hookworm eggs. And yeah, he's that's what you say when you drop a hoop bear for getting a famous hoop slanging fight. 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. Uh. The above written is true today, as your contributor wrote, no trademarks involves as far as I know, Stubby work shorts origin might be contested. And that is from Matt. Thanks Matt. What does Matt mean

in Australia? How you like your feet before you enter a dwelling? Okay, thanks Matt. If you want to get in touch of this, like Matt did, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. I'm also at josh um Clark check me out. You can hang on with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant and at Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an emails to Stuff podcast at house stuffworks dot com and has always joined us at home on the web.

Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how Stuff Works dot com. M