The first time I saw a noose made from torn bed sheets, I thought it was a dream. Eight and a half years in solitary confinement have shown me it’s a recurring nightmare. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pressed my face against cold steel, screaming for help while watching someone’s daughter, sister, mother, or grandmother trying to escape this concrete tomb the only way they felt they could.

When a person dies by suicide in the free world—at school, at work, in the military—there are protocols. Grief counselors arrive with emotional support animals, support groups form, and people gather to mourn. But here in Texas prisons we’re expected to return to our silent cells and stare at the evidence of our friends’ final moments. The blood stains may eventually fade from the floor, but they never fade from our minds. The guards get counseling after witnessing these deaths. They can request transfers to different units, away from the haunting memories of solitary confinement. But us? We’re trapped here, forced to be unwilling witnesses to death after death, with no help processing the trauma. Unless you’re already on the mental health caseload by taking psychotropic medications, you won’t see any of the four mental health counselors assigned to our 1,400 residents. They’re overwhelmed, burned out, leaving for other jobs. Just like the guards, just like the nurses, everyone gets to leave except us.

The Texas Civil Rights Project reports that solitary confinement correlates with dramatically higher suicide rates in prisons. But what the statistics don’t show is the face of my friend, who was barely 18 serving a three-year sentence, when she couldn’t take the isolation anymore. Society says she was too young to vote, too? Too young to drink, too young to serve in the military, but somehow old enough to be locked in a cage for twenty-three hours a day.

That’s what keeps me awake at night: many who are here aren’t serving life sentences. They’re teenagers, transferred from youth detention at 16 and a half, thrown directly into adult solitary confinement. The school-to-prison pipeline is real, but no one talks about the solitary-to-cemetery pipeline.

Even those who survive carry their attempts on their skin. I’ve seen arms that look like shiny hamburger meat covered in so many scars there’s no space left to cut. So they move to their necks. I want to grab the prosecutors, the judges by their robes and ask them: Was this a capital crime? Did you mean to sentence these children to death by isolation?

The guards have their rituals of remembrance. When one of their own dies by suicide, they wear memorial patches on their vests. They place plaques by the prison entrance. They order custom jackets with “In Memory Of” stitched across the back. They’re allowed to honor their dead, to process their grief, to heal together.

Meanwhile, we can’t hug each other in solitary. We press our hands against the cold walls, knowing our friend who died in the next cell did the same thing yesterday. Their death makes them no less human than a guard’s friend, yet we’re denied the basic dignity of mourning.

And what becomes of us, the ones sentenced to witness death over and over? I still haven’t figured out how to help myself cope. Every time I close my eyes, I see faces. Young faces. Faces that had years left on their sentence, not decades, but couldn’t bear another day in this tomb. Faces of people who were eligible or denied parole, who just needed to hold on a little longer. 

When will they learn that ending solitary confinement is the only way to end suicides in solitary confinement? The solution isn’t more counselors or better suicide watch protocols, though we desperately need both. The solution is to stop placing human beings in conditions that drive them to take their own lives.