Jay Marriott entered the common room at Snake River Correctional Facility, his six-foot frame swaying slightly—his body, perhaps, adjusting to an unfamiliar lightness. For years, he had been bound in shackles every time he left his small cell, burdened by chains that gripped his hands, feet, and body. Now, as he sat at the desk, a lone chain around his ankle tethered him to the seat.

There is something deeply unsettling about seeing a human being held by any chains at all. But for Jay, who had once been known among Oregon Department of Corrections staff as the “monster of Oregon,” and who had often been shackled in wrist and leg restraints, this represented undeniable progress.

As he began speaking about his life, Jay’s calm—occasionally even cheerful—bearing was evidence of the changes taking hold. Seated around him were incarcerated peer mentors, corrections officers, and other members of the “Resource Team” organized by Amend, a public health program based at the University of California, San Francisco, that helps individuals like Jay emerge from the long, dark shadow of years in solitary confinement. Just a few years ago, a conversation between Jay and this diverse group would have been unimaginable. Yet here he was. 

“My days are better now,” Jay said, describing what sounded like a tranquil routine—listening to music on the radio, conversing with staff on his unit, and regular yard time. As someone who had lived decades in isolation, he especially treasured moments of connection with other incarcerated people at Snake River. “I love hanging out with my friends Lomboi and Tadpole,” he said of his peer mentors. “They’ve been with me through everything.”

Jay even spoke of favorite staff members, including Capt. David Jantz, a long-serving corrections officer at Snake River. “We used to hate each other,” he said, “but now we understand each other. I can’t even imagine us talking like this, all civil, just a few years ago.” 

Jay’s story reflects a long-standing dilemma that hangs over the burgeoning national movement to end solitary confinement: How does the system handle those deemed “the worst of the worst”—people with extensive histories of violence who seem to have no place outside of isolation? These individuals, some of whom have spent years or even decades in solitary, pose a challenge that reformers and prison officials alike have struggled to address. For decades, the response has been to confine them further, to sequester them in a space where their rage and unpredictability cannot harm others. But the costs—psychological, emotional, and moral—are immense. Solitary confinement, while containing the immediate threat, slowly erases the person within. 

To destroy someone in this way is to absolutely deny them the possibility of redemption.

That’s exactly what happened to Jay. In the parlance of the officers overseeing his treatment, he “earned” his way into solitary. He first came to Snake River in February 2002, following a guilty charge of robbery in the second degree. With good behavior, Jay could have gotten out in a few years—but the opposite happened. Jay “acted up,” getting involved in gang violence and fighting with staff and other incarcerated people (or “adults in custody,” as they are called in Oregon). At various times, searches of his cell revealed contraband and weapons. 

All of this landed him in solitary confinement, which instead of curtailing his misbehavior, exacerbated it. A vicious cycle started—a twisted feedback loop that caused irreparable harm to Jay and others: Jay would misbehave, get sent to solitary, and behave even worse in solitary, thus extending his time in isolation. Reflecting on those years, Jay describes it bluntly: “Prison felt like a torture box.” 

The charges kept piling up. His record from 2002 to 2020—nearly 100 documented violent incidents—made him notorious, and his original five-year sentence stretched to decades. “He couldn’t stop hurting people,” Capt. Jantz said. 

Even the smallest disturbances—a meal arriving late, the low hum of a neighbor’s radio—were enough to set Jay off. His rage was unpredictable, and the consequences were sometimes extreme. In one infamous outburst, he ripped a sink from the wall. In others, his fury was aimed at the staff, occasionally sending them to the hospital. Desperate for control, the prison resorted to locking him in a specially designed holding cell: a black metal box. But even that, a solution as medieval as it sounds, couldn’t quell the storm inside him.

It’s easy to reduce this story to the familiar trope of the irredeemable prisoner—a man hardwired for violence, too damaged to rehabilitate, briefly subdued by a prison system that’s merely trying to maintain order. But to accept this narrative is to overlook the prison’s role in fostering the very conditions that fueled Jay’s misbehavior, particularly the damage inflicted by years of unrelenting solitary confinement. 

In fact, while it may represent an extreme case, what happened to Jay is the rule, rather than the exception, for a human mind placed in precarious conditions of isolation seemingly tailor-made to break it. 

Among one of the well-documented psychological effects of isolation is a complete deterioration of what makes us recognizably human. It is a deceptively simple machine—in Jay’s case, a literal black box at times—for unmaking a person, depriving and stripping away all those parts of life that bestow joy, meaning, and sanity. 

Individuals placed in solitary for months and years frequently lose their ability to communicate normally; they experience psychosis—a disconnection from reality—and hear voices and see things that are not there. Their senses begin to trick them; they become overly sensitive to stimuli—yet solitary units are typically a cacophony of negative sound and activity, with desperate people shouting to communicate or crying out for help. “The noise and chaos,” Jay said, “it’s like a pressure cooker.”  They regress in their ability to tolerate distress and cope extremely poorly with stressors that wouldn’t bother most people (like that lunch tray that was running late). 

In short, most people placed in solitary for any length of time lose themselves, sometimes irreparably. 

For some staff, Jay began to seem less than human—a perception shaped by a system that also conditions corrections officers to see people in solitary as threats, not individuals. “It was impossible to have a conversation with him,” one longtime staff member recalled. “This is terrible to say—but he was like an animal.” 

Beyond this, people in solitary self-harm and attempt suicide, sometimes successfully. According to a New York City jail study, individuals in isolation are up to seven times more likely to self-harm, with over half of all such incidents occurring in these units. The risk of suicide is equally staggering—nearly 50 percent of all prison suicides take place in solitary confinement, despite it housing only about 6 percent of the prison population, as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

Yet solitary confinement is a regular, commonly accepted practice in the United States. On a given day in 2019, more than 120,000 individuals were in so-called “restrictive” housing—sitting in cells measuring about 6 x 9 feet for at least 22 hours a day. 

• • •

By the summer of 2024, when the visit with Jay took place, it appeared that the cycle of violence had finally been broken, yielding a man who was capable of engaging with others while remaining articulate, polite, relaxed, and organized. The contrast between Jay’s past and his present was striking—and, given the narrative around the irredeemable “monsters” who are relegated to indefinite solitary confinement, it was inspiring as well.

Much of Jay’s transformation over the past four years can be attributed to the work of Amend, which is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco’s Division of Health Equity and Society and led by director Brie Williams, a medical doctor with a background in public health and healthcare in carceral settings. 

Emphasizing the inherent dignity of those in prison, Amend has worked with staff to recalibrate prison culture, at Snake River and at other facilities in Oregon, Washington, California, and North Dakota. Amend’s work draws heavily on lessons from Norway’s prison system, where correctional officers focus on rehabilitation and human dignity, and prisons are designed to resemble outside life as much as possible. U.S. prison staff have toured Norwegian facilities like Halden, known for its humane approach, where officers and prisoners interact more like neighbors than adversaries. The result? Norway’s recidivism rate hovers around 20 percent, compared to the U.S.’s 76 percent.

At the heart of the Norwegian approach is something known as “dynamic security.” The concept shifts the prison’s focus from rigid rule enforcement to fostering trust and human connection—an approach that stands in stark contrast to the methods employed in most American prisons.

In the U.S., safety is often ensured through the strict enforcement of rules, and any infraction is met with immediate punishment. Dynamic security, however, offers something more fluid, more human. At Snake River, this has required correctional officers to rethink their roles entirely. Instead of functioning solely as disciplinarians, COs have had to embrace roles more akin to mentors, healers, or guides—those who listen, engage, and attempt to build real relationships with the individuals in their care. It’s a profound shift. Officers are no longer merely the keepers of order; they are agents of change.

Officers have even been trained to adjust their body language when interacting with adults in custody, moving from confrontational postures to ones that invite dialogue and cooperation. Standing beside someone instead of across from them; asking questions rather than issuing orders—small, seemingly insignificant gestures can shift the dynamics of an entire encounter. It’s an approach built on empathy, not just authority, and one that challenges everything American corrections has long held as gospel.

Corrections officers don’t typically welcome outsiders telling them how to do their jobs, and Capt. Jantz was no exception. When Amend introduced Norwegian-style reforms during a staff lecture, Jantz’s resistance was palpable. At the time, the notion of treating those in custody (ostensibly, the enemy) with empathy was entirely foreign to him.

But something changed. Jantz recalls a role-playing exercise led by his Norwegian colleagues that upended everything he thought he knew about discipline. In the scenario, he played the role of an unresponsive incarcerated man, sitting silently in a cell. His fellow officers, tasked with getting him to respond, were instructed to yell and pound relentlessly on the door. “My fight or flight kicked in,” Jantz admitted. His heart raced. His mind clouded. “I couldn’t follow instructions anymore. I just got up. I was moving, and they wouldn’t stop. It was so loud inside the cell that I wanted to fight three of my colleagues—folks I had worked with for years.”

For the first time, Jantz felt what it was like to be on the other side of the door—cornered, overwhelmed, trapped. “Before that scenario, I never had training like this,” he said. Later that night, alone in his hotel room, the weight of it all hit him: “How many people have we harmed over the years, just because of the way we were trained?”

It was a stark realization, one that reframed his entire approach to corrections. Prison officers generally undergo a process of acculturation, where they are taught that flexibility or forgiveness is weakness; that rules must be enforced to the letter; that incarcerated individuals will exploit any kindness shown to them. This is, at its core, an oppositional stance that countless psychological and criminological studies have shown only inspires further resistance and escalation. 

What Amend offers staff, at Snake River and elsewhere, is an opportunity to deprogram from these ways of operating, and reimagine what an alternative protocol for safe prisons looks like. Ironically, for them it means lowering their guard and being willing to engage with incarcerated people on a “real” human level. Captain Jantz put it more simply, “Stop being cops.”

• • •

People like Jay Marriot might seem like the last people to trial dynamic security with. But Dr. Brie Williams pressed the SRCI team to see it in the opposite way: if it worked with their so-called “worst of the worst”, it could work with anyone.

With Jay, the work started cautiously, like tending to a wound that had festered for years. In the early days, much of that work revolved around repairing the relationship with Capt. Jantz—a man who, for years, had been Jay’s enforcer and adversary. They had been involved in dozens of physical and verbal altercations with each other.

Jantz began to approach Jay differently. Instead of simply reacting to the violence, he started asking questions: How are you? How’s your day going? What do you need? At first, Jay met these efforts with hostility, barking back insults, uninterested in this sudden shift. The progress was almost invisible, but it was there, simmering beneath the surface.

Over time, a transformation took place. When asked what changed, Jay spoke simply: “All the positivity made it harder to think about the bad stuff … so instead of constantly fighting them, I thought, just give these guys a chance.” Initially, it was purely transactional—good behavior earned him small privileges, like extra radio time or art supplies. 

But eventually, something more profound took hold. Jay began to manage his own behavior, not for rewards, but because he wanted to. “I think we really started to turn the corner,” Jantz reflected, “when it wasn’t about making deals anymore, when good things just came naturally.”

Jay echoed the sentiment. “I worked my way up out of the dark,” he said. “He [Jantz] was there backing me up.” A man once defined by rage and isolation, Jay found himself not only in control of his own actions but in possession of something rarer in prison—a sense of trust.

But Jantz wasn’t acting alone in efforts to rehabilitate Jay. Lomboi and Tadpole, two fellow incarcerated men who are core members of the Resource Team , worked with him regularly to practice communication skills. As two individuals who have experienced the vicissitudes of solitary confinement for themselves, they have an intimate understanding of what that isolation is like—“the way it tears at the soul,” as Lomboi said. 

For Lomboi, solitary confinement was more than isolation—it was a breeding ground for hatred, an environment where distrust hardened into enmity. “We hated them,” he said, speaking of the guards. “In turn, they hated us.” The corrosive atmosphere seemed to pit both sides against each other in a battle of attrition. Tadpole, too, found his emotions hijacked by solitary. “I acted out,” he confessed, recalling how grief transmuted into rage, as if the very air inside those cells compelled violence.

With their special knowledge of the hell Jay was going through, Lomboi and Tadpole were people that Jay could express his feelings to, who would also in turn provide positive reinforcement. “They were telling me constantly to look on the positive side … I took that lesson back to the cell. And I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s try this.'”

With the support of the Resource Team, Jay was eventually able to engage in activities that would have been unimaginable years earlier. He walked the perimeter of the prison, helped build a sweat lodge, and even played basketball without shackles. Slowly, Jay began to reconnect with himself, rediscovering parts of his identity that had been buried during his long years in isolation. 

When asked about Amend, Jay was emphatic: “They need to bring this everywhere and help people like me.” 

• • •

In fact, the effects of dynamic security have rippled far beyond Snake River’s segregation unit. Even some Snake River officers unaffiliated with Amend have adopted a softer, more empathetic approach, improving safety and fostering better relationships between staff and incarcerated people. “It’s a way different prison than it was before,” one veteran officer noted. “We used to see them as enemies; now they’re neighbors.”

New staff, the officer observed, still tend to follow the rules rigidly, viewing everything in black and white. But seasoned officers bring nuance to tense situations. “We use sugar and honey to keep the peace … we embrace the gray.”

For one 20-year veteran, the shift was personal. “That toxicity stays with you,” he said, “but I don’t take it home anymore. I’m more present with my family … when I’m home, I’m home.” 

However, the model faces real hurdles. The Resource Team at Snake River still runs without dedicated funding from Oregon’s Department of Corrections, relying on staff volunteers to keep it afloat. “We’re juggling this on top of everything else,” one staffer said, “It’s worth it, but we need funded positions.” As Williams puts it, “It’s in the name: a resource team requires resources.” Some—like Capt. Jantz—believe the work has just begun. He envisions a dedicated unit at Snake River for the  individuals who have historically been most isolated: a major investment in rehabilitating the prison’s hardest cases.

The vision Amend has nurtured at Snake River remains, though the path forward is far from straightforward. As Superintendent Jamie Miller reflected, “We’re running on goodwill,” the progress sustained by a fragile coalition of volunteers and strained resources.  “We’re victims of our own success,” Miller admits, as Amend’s champions are pulled away to replicate their model elsewhere, leaving Snake River at a crossroads. It’s a fragile triumph, one that, unless reinforced, could strain and shatter under the gravity of its own reach.

Seeing their success with Jay, one might imagine Resource Teams as a universal escape hatch from solitary confinement. But as Brie Williams notes, this model was crafted for only the most severe cases—those trapped in isolation for years, where the psychological damage runs deepest. It’s just one of several paths out of solitary, not a one-size-fits-all solution. 

For many in solitary confinement options exist that are simpler, faster, and cheaper. For some, the solution is small dedicated units that offer specialized mental health care, or safe havens for LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable individuals. For others, it is easier still: Rick Raemisch, the pioneering former head of Colorado’s Department of Corrections, was the first to nearly rid his state’s prison system of prolonged isolation. The answer for many in solitary, he said, is to “just open the door” and reintegrate people into communal life, without barriers or unnecessary delays.

Several states have begun constructing these ladders out of “the hole,” experimenting with structured “incentive systems” designed to reduce solitary time and foster self-regulation. These programs trade punishment for motivation, offering rewards like increased yard time or access to reading materials in exchange for positive behavior. In a setting steeped in punitive control, these initiatives allow people in solitary to reclaim a sense of agency  without the constant shadow of force.

At its core, this approach is a form of harm reduction, and only a partial answer. The best way to reduce solitary is, quite simply, to prevent people from entering it at all. Today, tens of thousands of people remain in solitary confinement across the United States—a number that speaks to an institutional reflex to isolate, punish, and contain. True change requires not just gradual reform but a dismantling of the structures that perpetuate solitary.

Across the country, solitary confinement is increasingly facing its reckoning. Under pressure from a growing anti-solitary movement, new legislation, groundbreaking lawsuits, and shifting public opinion, states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Nevada, and Colorado are aligning their policies with the UN’s Mandela Rules, a set of international standards that define extended isolation as a form of torture. These shifts reflect a deepening recognition that prolonged solitary confinement is not merely damaging—it’s a fundamental violation of human rights.

Jay’s story underscores the paradox at the heart of these reforms. After his work with the Resource Team, he is no longer violent—at least not in the ways that once defined him. But his existence remains limited, his daily routine marked by moments of controlled freedom and brief exchanges with others. He listens to the radio and interacts well with mentors and staff, but the question lingers: Could he ever truly reenter the general prison population, or any semblance of a “normal” life? Even to move someone from solitary to general population is not necessarily  liberation—it is simply another form of confinement with its own set of problems.

As the nation’s approach to solitary confinement shifts, places like Snake River will become test cases for how far this transformation can reach. Beyond Oregon, Amend is working with Washington, California, and Connecticut to staff, train, and deploy fully-funded Resource Teams—and a related intervention aimed at preventing solitary confinement in the first place, called the Activity Team—in more than a dozen prisons, with plans to grow that number in 2025.

The system of solitary confinement is a box within a cage, its walls compressing and bruising the minds it traps. Dr. Williams sees the Resource Team as one of many tools needed to pry open this nested enclosure. 

But there is a deeper reckoning ahead, one that extends beyond merely reforming solitary. True success isn’t found in marginally reducing harm, but in dismantling the structures that make harm necessary. The carceral state, with its reliance on isolation and dehumanization, must at least be reduced, and preferably wholly reimagined. The challenge ahead isn’t just in reducing the use of solitary—it’s in envisioning what justice looks like when cages are not the answer, and when systems are judged not by their ability to punish, but by their capacity to heal.

Photo: A view of Snake River Correctional Facility in Malheur County, Oregon, by Think Out Loud on Flickr.