Natasha White is a movement leader, writer, and survivor of solitary confinement. After serving 15 years in the New York State prison system—including four in solitary confinement—she is now a leader in the fight against the brutality of the carceral system. As the Coordinator for the Virginia Coalition on Solitary Confinement and the Director of Community Engagement at Interfaith Action for Human Rights, White mobilizes community members and engages legislators to end state-sanctioned torture. Additionally, White is the CEO and Founder of Broken Crayons Can Still Color, a nonprofit that provides resources and healing-centered care to women, youth, and families impacted by systemic and interpersonal violence. 

Reflecting on her inspiration for the piece, White writes, “My essay is actually built from a poem I wrote while I was in solitary, called ‘The Hole.’ During my 15 years of incarceration, I spent four of those years in solitary confinement. Writing poems was how I passed my time—it gave me an escape into the outside world. It was my way of processing what I was experiencing and reclaiming my voice in a place designed to silence it.”

White is on Facebook (Natasha White), Instagram (@natasha_makes_change), and TikTok (@law_changing_tash), and more information about her organization can be found at brokencrayonscanstillcolor.org.

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Solitary confinement—what they call “The Hole”—is designed to break you. I lived it. Four long years for 23 hours a day, I was trapped inside a cell with nothing but fluorescent lights and four concrete walls, a space where time doesn’t pass but drips slowly like water torture. The conditions were “perfect,” if perfection meant creating the kind of mental chaos that leaves a woman shattered in mind, body, and spirit.

Inside that space, I watched my identity start to unravel. My soul became unrecognizable, my thoughts fragmented. The isolation wasn’t just physical—it was emotional, spiritual, psychological. Sleep deprivation was a form of sanctioned cruelty. Lights stayed on around the clock, denying us even the dignity of night. I would drift in and out of consciousness, my mind plagued by hallucinations and despair. I often wondered if death would be easier than enduring another day like that.

There’s no rest for the weary in the hole. There are no rights, only rules—and even those change depending on the mood of the officers. Many were numb to our suffering. The cries, the screams, the begging—it was all background noise to them. But for us, it was the sound of mental warfare. Women were breaking down all around me, and I was one of them. I was screaming, too. Not always aloud—but inside, I was pleading to be seen, to be heard, to be helped.

The psychological toll was infectious. Despair spread from one cell to the next. We were all afflicted. There’s a reason solitary is compared to torture—it quite literally reprograms the brain. I began to lose parts of myself I believed were core to who I was. Memories became slippery. Hope, almost laughable. I tried to hold on, but I was sinking. The person I had been before that experience began to disappear.

I saw things that no one should have to see. I watched women die—women who took their own lives, hanging from vents like laundry to dry. I watched others try and fail. And each time it happened, I knew it didn’t have to be this way. Those deaths were preventable. They were the consequence of a system that ignores suffering until it’s too late.

I’ve never felt closer to death than I did in that cell. And yet, no matter how long I remained in that cage, no matter how loud our pain became, the world outside didn’t come rushing in. Solitary is not just about confinement; it’s about abandonment. It’s about being treated as less than human.

So yes, 23 hours a day, the conditions were just right—to watch a woman unravel completely. To witness her spirit suffocate, her mind fracture. Solitary confinement is not a place for healing or reflection. It is a place designed for destruction. That was my experience in The Hole.

And I survived it. But I will never be the same.