“Prison is a strange place. A very lonely place. My experience is it’s a place designed to make people locked in it incommunicado. Surely, being able to correspond with someone would brighten my days.”
—Letter from someone in long-term isolation in Green Haven Correctional Facility, New York

In life outside of prison, time is a resource that we control by filling it. We organize our days around work, family, and friends; we schedule appointments and fulfill obligations. Most significantly, we make plans for the future. Time is meaningful because we understand ourselves and each other by how we move through it. We can see our past and anticipate what’s ahead. 

For people in prison, this sense of time and futurity is taken away. Time is not their own. It stops being a resource and becomes, as two prison researchers once put it, “an undifferentiated landscape which has to be marked up and traversed.” People living behind bars don’t know when they will be released, and they have no ability to decide what they will do the next day or the next year. The future becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. The meaning of time evaporates, along with any sense of control over it. 

Incarcerated people “do” time, but it isn’t theirs. 

Solitary confinement is the most extreme form of this deprivation. In “the box,” the concept of time itself is annihilated. There are no group meals or prison activities to mark the hours and distinguish the days. Someone locked in solitary in an English prison described feeling that time “stood still.” He was “stuck in a cave, without a ladder.” Another said that “time stops, you’re sort of stuck in a time machine.” The days come and go, but they cease to mean anything.

This sense of being stranded in time is central to the purpose of solitary confinement. Stripping away time also strips away any sense of selfhood. There is only the cell, 22 to 24 hours a day, for months and often years. It’s a black hole into which time dissolves, without any human contact to interrupt it. This is torture, and it leads to severe and lasting psychological damage. 

To survive the loss of any logical understanding of time, people in solitary must create their own—which means, as one person in isolation put it, “increasing the content of the hours.” They must make time meaningful in order to find themselves within it. 

Letters from the outside world can help do this. As one of the only forms of communication available to people in solitary, letters can do something remarkable: bring the outside world in. This, in large part, is why Solitary Watch created the Lifelines to Solitary program, which connects volunteers with people living in long-term isolation.

Letters do more than just bring news of the world beyond the cell. They carry with them the feeling of ordinary, non-prison, everyday time. There is a postmark, with a date. There is the anticipation of its arrival, and there is reflection after it has been read. Letters give someone a sense of what time looks like beyond the prison’s reach, and, however briefly, a way to structure time for themselves, using something that belongs to them, not the prison. Writing to another person consistently can create a sense of futurity and linear time through a continually deepening relationship. 

In other words, time becomes real through other people: through shared experiences, and through a shared sense of what it means to move through life. When people are deprived of human contact, time no longer exists.

There is a wide body of research supporting the idea that reclaiming a traumatic narrative through writing can be cathartic. When you write about a difficult experience, you can claim it as yours. But writing letters does something that private writing doesn’t; telling your story to someone else can restore a sense of social identity, and therefore of your position in time and place. You are not just lost in your head, completely turned inward. You can map your world and let someone else into it. You can develop your voice, describe things, realize you have a right to self-expression, to imagination, to a soul. You are no longer stranded.

Communication between incarcerated people and the outside world has been monitored and suppressed in the United States since the earliest experiments with mass incarceration in the 19th century. Prison officials have always treated correspondence as something to be controlled, and the distrust and suspicion with which they regard it is clearer today than ever. Sending letters to incarcerated loved ones has become increasingly difficult. Most prisons restrict what type of paper can be used, and prohibit including innocuous—but often meaningful—things like stickers or drawings. Many require mail to first be sent to a private vendor to process and digitize, which can add weeks to the amount of time someone waits for a letter.

The reason for this seems clear: connecting with people is the quickest way to make someone feel like a human being, and this is not the aim of incarceration, and certainly not of solitary confinement. 

This is why, for more than a decade, we have built and sustained the Lifelines to Solitary program. We have long understood that facilitating these relationships is an act of resistance against a system designed to disconnect and dehumanize. 

No letter can undo the harms of solitary confinement, or give someone back the time they have lost. But letters can restore someone’s feeling of sharing time with other people, and therefore, their sense of themselves. This requires only the willingness to listen, to share, to write—and to keep writing.