I first met James Daly when covering a story for San Quentin News about what it meant to be a youth mentor at this prison. He told me a story about arriving here from his previous prison, which had a service dog training program. He was torn, but happy to be part of the youth program here. Then he told me about his past—particularly, the decades he spent in total isolation at the federal supermax prison, ADX, in Florence, Colorado. What surprised me was his openness to doing something positive for young people who find themselves trapped inside the Prison Industrial Complex. He understands the difficult road that youngsters face, coming inside prison without proper guidance. I see Jimmy fighting for the betterment of youngsters, every day. Finally, he openly uses his past experiences to show that solitary confinement is a dangerous way to seek positive change in human beings. —Juan Moreno Haines

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My name is James Daly and I am currently incarcerated at San Quentin in California. At 61 years old, I have spent nearly four and a half decades in prison, the last 33 years consecutively. The first 27 years were spent in the federal Bureau of Prisons, 24 of them in a supermax setting, mostly in USP Marion in Southern Illinois and at the Administrative Maximum facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

In April 2017, after completing my federal prison term, I was transferred into the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. As a former gang member, I am now on a journey to transform my life into a life worth living—a responsible lifestyle, one which my family would be proud of.

Upon leaving solitary confinement, I promised myself that I would never forget the hopelessness and death that occurs inside supermax prisons like ADX and USP Marion. It’s a slow death that occurs from deep within. It will often overtake you before you realize it is happening. And my personal transformation is testament that the effects of long-term segregation are serious, thus conditions of confinement should never be inhumane.

I can’t help but think back to all of the lost lives that I left behind, the people that fell into the dark recesses of their mind, an abyss, and were never able to find their way back. It is these men that I hope to give voice to—those that are no longer capable of providing a coherent voice. My voice has to save others from that suffering.

I witnessed men that I knew well, whom I believed to be physically and mentally strong, fall apart and become just shells of their former selves. I am not sure that it is possible to accurately identify at what point long-term isolation breaks a man, but many academic studies have shown that it does. I believe that it is different for everyone, and that it is a more gradual process that doesn’t lend itself to identifying any particular moment. I describe it as a “slow drift into the abyss.”

Frequently that slow drift begins with paranoia. People feel that others are talking about them, plotting on them, secretly watching, filming, or listening to them. You will notice them having less and less conversations with others; and what communication that does exist begins to seem a little odd and out of character. They appear lost in deep thought. Many begin talking to themselves and eventually become more interested in the conversations they are having with themselves than in what is going on around them. And once the communication breaks down, you begin to see a void or absence in their eyes, and it becomes clear that they are on that slow path to their own personal hell. 

Many become suicidal. Others become self-mutilaters—cutting on themselves, swallowing objects such as pencils, staples or razor blades, and in some cases even inserting them into their penises.

Others try to strike out at anyone they can (officers or prisoners). I have witnessed a person place feces in his mouth so that he could get it through the strip search, then once taken out to the dog run for his two hours of recreation, spit the feces on the officers escorting him, or on whoever is placed in the dog run next to him. I have witnessed others just drop their pants in the middle of the cage, do their deed and then pick it up and throw it on the person closest to him. And then others smear their feces on themselves and or on the walls of their cell. Oddly, a fascination with human waste is not uncommon once they have slipped off into the deep end.

Finally, someone who emerges from decades of isolation, who has spent years dwelling on the loneliness experienced there, blames everyone else for the hell he has experienced. The anger and bitterness consumes his every thought. His rage is so unpredictable, but obvious to those around him, even his fellow convicts, as well as the guards who are forced to have contact with him, are very cautious of. Society should be aware that places like this can create such dangerous monsters and should be fearful of them.

There is no way to know who will be broken by long-term isolation, and who will somehow find the strength to get through it. What I can tell you with some certainty is no one leaves there unscathed. However, having spent decades in solitary confinement, I have learned how to identify those men who are more likely to have a difficult time handling the years or even decades of isolation. While by no means is it always the case, more often than not, it is those men that tend to be social butterflies, that like to talk, that enjoy or even need a lot of social interaction who find it unbearable. When social interaction is taken away from them, many just find it too difficult to go on. But those that are at least somewhat introverted, or could be considered “dreamers,” tend to be able to cope a little better with the isolation. Obviously, this is based upon my decades of observation. I have no formal education in psychology.

In late 1994 and early 1995, most of the prisoners who were housed at the old federal supermax prison in Marion, Illinois, were airlifted to Florence, Colorado (ADX), to open up the new federal supermax. ADX is a high-tech fortress, like a futuristic citadel in a sci-fi movie. Its mission statement was to house the Bureau’s most infamous criminals, gang members and drug kingpins, and limit their ability to communicate with each other, as well as with the outside world. The goal was to isolate prisoners and either force them to conform or break them.  ADX in some circles became known as “The Alcatraz of the Rockies.” 

Even today, entering the prison, the walls in the hallways appear freshly painted and the floor recently waxed and buffed. Everything is pristine, almost sterile in appearance. Any time a prisoner is under escort, whether in the unit or being escorted down the long hallways outside the unit, no other prisoner is allowed out of their cell. You never see another while being moved. If the guards aren’t talking to each other then the only sound that can be heard are your footsteps, the opening and closing of the grill gates as you pass through them, and your leg irons scraping on the floor beneath you. It was always an eerie feeling.

After being stripped searched you are placed in waist chains and leg irons. You are either on a two- or three-man hold, and one officer will hold the back of your waist chain while the other officer will walk right alongside of you with a billy club in his hand. The hallways are long and have no windows, so even the direction you are being escorted can sometimes become confusing. The prison is broken up into different sections with grill gates made of iron bars that open and slam closed as you walk through them, all controlled by a central control center that watches all movement via a security surveillance system. Big Brother is watching—and not just the prisoners, but the guards as well.

But it was inside those cells where the real darkness existed. Life in that cell was every bit like living within a tomb. It was simply existing. Time had no meaning. What day, month or even year it was became irrelevant as every day was little different from any other. Yesterday was no different than today, and today will be no different than tomorrow. Because time had become so meaningless, I found it necessary to begin keeping a calendar. I would use it more like a day planner and write down the dates I received and mailed letters, otherwise I would simply lose track. As I grew accustomed to the isolation, the days, months, and years would pass me by almost unnoticed.  I found that if I didn’t write down when I wrote someone I would either believe that much more time had elapsed than actually had and get frustrated that I hadn’t received a response back yet, or would allow weeks or even months to pass before realizing that I needed to respond to someone.

As the years began to pass—five, ten, even twenty years—without human contact and only minimal communication, life began to weigh heavily on me.  Slowly, the only world that existed to me became nothing more than the shows I watched on TV. I am sure that explains my utter fascination with reality TV shows; they would take me out to the “real world,” albeit distorted and unrealistic, and allow me to experience life as I would have liked it to be.

It wasn’t long before I began to question every aspect of my life. Was this all that life had become? Would I spend another year, ten years, or even die within these walls, alone and without anything meaningful to show for my life? There was a kind of helplessness that set in that made me do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do. I am ashamed to admit it, but for the first time in my life I seriously considered suicide as a viable option to escape the darkness that I found myself in. The thought of living out the rest of my life in an empty concrete box, forgotten and alone, was just an overwhelming thought.

But then there were more serious moments, when I would look back over how I had lived my life. I had spent my entire life in prison. It was certainly a time for self-reflection. I was not a good person, and hadn’t been a good person in quite some time. What I found was a person who had, unfortunately, lived life completely self-absorbed. I acted without any consideration for others in the pursuit of whatever I wanted. I left a wide path of shattered lives and destruction in my wake without any thought at what I had done. I began to ask myself, how did I become this person? And, maybe more importantly, how had I come to spend decades in solitary confinement?

Now that I am removed from the years spent in solitary confinement, I have a somewhat contradictory view on the wisdom of such places. I think in large part, it’s what saved my life and inspired me to change. It gave me the opportunity to find myself. Of course, we can’t know if I would have reached this point in my life without having experienced what I did in USP Marion and ADX, or if I may have come to this sooner or later anyway. However, what I do know with certainty is that it took me to some very dark places of my mind, but I would like to think that I came out the other side a better person and continue to this day to seek change in my life. 

Having said that, I have also seen the destruction that solitary confinement causes, the horrors; I have witnessed how the mind begins to break down in the darkness of that cell. I was one of the fortunate, but there are many men that will never recover from their experience there, some of whom have become ticking time bombs just waiting to explode. Many of these men will one day be released back into society, and I can assure you some of these men you would be horrified to run into on a dark night. Trust me, there is a reason that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has a policy not to release anyone on parole directly out of ADX. 

To some extent, those who spent time in places like ADX will forever carry the scars associated with long-term isolation—it’s the nature of the beast. I deal with those scars by seeking positive change in the systems that rely on places like ADX as tools to control their prison population, since I am convinced there are better ways.