Women have been disappearing into America’s darkest rooms since long before anyone had the courage to call it torture. As legal journalist Jessica Pishko traced in her history of women’s prisons, the earliest institutions built to house women weren’t designed around rehabilitation or even punishment in any coherent sense. They were designed around control, shaped by rigid ideas about femininity, obedience, and moral deviance. Solitary confinement became one of the sharpest instruments for enforcing all three. And more than a century later, it still is.

I am writing this from experience that is both personal and political. I spent eight and a half years in solitary confinement. Not days. Not weeks. Eight and a half years in a cell smaller than most people’s parking spaces, with no meaningful human contact, no natural light, no sense of time beyond what my body could remember. I am not writing from theory. I am writing from inside the facts.

And the fact is this: solitary confinement is torture. In 2011, United Nations Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez made it official, declaring that any period of isolation exceeding fifteen consecutive days meets the international legal threshold for torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. His reasoning was physiological as much as moral. The human nervous system requires social contact the way it requires oxygen. Deprive it long enough, and the damage is not metaphorical. It is measurable, structural, and frequently permanent.

That damage falls on everyone who enters isolation. But it does not fall equally. Women bear a disproportionate share, and the reasons why begin long before any prison sentence.

Consider who arrives. More than 90 percent of women with criminal justice system involvement have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Eighty-six percent of jailed women report having experienced sexual violence in their lifetime and seventy-seven percent report intimate partner violence. In a 2009 study of delinquent girls in South Carolina, 81 percent reported a history of sexual violence. These are not edge cases. They are the overwhelming majority. The prison system receives them already fractured by years of abuse, and its response, far too often, is to place them in a room alone with the memory of every wound they’ve ever survived.

That is not incidental. That is the mechanism of the harm.

When a woman who has spent years under the control of an abuser is locked alone in a cell, stripped of autonomy over her own movement, her own sleep, her own body, the institution is not doing something new to her. It is doing something familiar. The locked door, the powerlessness, the silence, the absence of anyone who might intervene: these are not abstract deprivations for a survivor of domestic violence or sexual assault. They are the original injury, reconstructed in concrete and fluorescent light, and administered by the state.

I know what that reconstruction feels like from the inside. Somewhere around year two, I stopped being able to sleep through the night. Somewhere around year four, I started narrating my days out loud just to hear a human voice, even if it had to be my own. Time stopped organizing itself into weeks. The walls, and I mean this as precisely as I can, began to feel like something pressing inward. Not metaphorically pressing. Physically pressing. The body registers prolonged isolation as a sustained threat, because that is exactly what it is.

Former prisoners of war say the same thing. Veterans who survived isolation in enemy camps describe the identical constellation: hallucinations, paranoia, an inability to regulate emotion, a hypervigilance that does not diminish even years after release. The United States military has long recognized that subjecting an enemy combatant to extended isolation constitutes a violation of the Geneva Convention. We teach this in war colleges. We prosecute it in international tribunals. And simultaneously, inside our own correctional facilities, we do it to American women, most of them survivors of violence, with far less oversight than we would ever tolerate for a captured soldier.

The scale of this contradiction is not small. Women now represent the fastest-growing incarcerated population in the country. According to the Sentencing Project, the number of women in prison rose 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, a rate one and a half times faster than the growth of the male prison population over the same period. Into this swelling population, solitary confinement has reached further for women than for men: approximately 20.4 percent of women in prison report spending time in isolation, compared to 17.9 percent of men. That gap is not explained by behavior. Women in prison commit fewer violent infractions on average than men. The gap is explained by something else entirely, by a system that was built to punish women who deviate, not to protect people who are suffering.

Pishko’s historical research makes clear that this impulse is not new. The earliest reformatories and custodial prisons for women were designed by people who believed that female criminality was fundamentally a problem of moral failure, and that isolation was a corrective. The logic has barely changed. Only the language has been updated.

I am evidence of what that logic produces over eight and a half years. I am also evidence that the person placed in that cell does not stop being a person while she is inside it. She thinks. She writes when she can. She tracks the damage being done to her with the part of her mind that has not yet been reached. She knows, even when no one outside those walls seems to, that what is happening to her has a name.

Today, I am asking that we say the name plainly. Solitary confinement, as currently practiced in the United States, is torture. It is torture applied disproportionately to survivors of abuse. It is torture administered by a democracy that has signed international agreements prohibiting exactly this. And it is torture that will continue, quietly and efficiently, until enough people outside these walls decide that the women disappearing into them deserve the same protections we extend to prisoners of war. 

They do. We do. The silence ends when you decide it does.