A desperate prisoner sent a handwritten letter to a judge and revealed a heinous isolation system

Timothy Gumm, convicted of rape in a prison in Jackson, Georgia, was charged with trying to escape in 2010. Five years later wrote, by hand and without legal opinion, a letter to Judge Charles H. Weiglin which he complained that from that moment on he had been windowless cell almost 24 hours a dayeven after this charge was expunged from his behavior.

Its situation was repeated in 2017 61,000 cases in 38 states of the United States and in prisons of the federal penitentiary that use solitary confinement. Among those punished with this method were minors, pregnant women and people with mental disorders, according to a survey by the Arthur Liman Center on Public Laws of the University of Yale.

During the five years he spent locked up in isolation cells by 2 by 4 meters, Gumm – who he believed that he would stay there indefinitelyand that's why he appealed to the judge – he lost all relationship with his family, he lost almost 25 pounds and was "deprived of almost any stimulus environmental and sensory, and almost all human contact. "His eleven-page manuscript, convinced the judge, who opened a case.

The Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) accepted the ad honorem representation of Gumm and asked the Craig Haney, social psychologist, professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the best cell solvers in the United States who will investigate the Special Control Unit of Georgia (SMU).

"There I saw things that I had never seen"he said to NBC News The specialist with 40 years of experience in the subject.

On the surfaces of the size of the parking lot of a car, with locked metal doors and windows, the detainees were "hermetically sealed". Among them, he observed a surprisingly high amount of people with mental illness (almost 40%), in addition to many others without this diagnosis, but state of psychological demolitionthey have hurt themselves, have stained their blood cells, have eaten their faeces or swallowed piles or sharp elements to commit suicide.

Haney described a unit pavilion as "resembling an asylum", in which he resonated "the cacophony of cries of prisoners and requests for help". On one occasion, he saw a roughly written sign saying "Help," the network reported.

Your report, published in 2017, when Gumm, it was already two and a half years of isolation, resulted in a clbad action. The file was presented "to prevent prison guards from keeping people in a extreme form of solitary confinement for many years without significant supervision and without prospect of leaving"

The Georgian SMU building, which houses 192 detainees, "is the most restrictive prison and the only one of its kind" in the state, according to the text of the lawsuit. "It's also the place where a behavior modification scheme based on isolationknown as the Level III program. "

This scheme is in theory an "incentive program" used to encourage "adequate adjustments" so that inmates "can be reintegrated into common housing". But according to the trial, "in practice, people are sent to the isolation program indefinitely for years, beyond his behavior and despite the Serious consequences of long-term solitary confinement on health"

The text indicated that isolation was historically used as "torture technique".

Haney concluded that Jackson's criminal unit was "one of the facilities harder and more draconian than I saw in the activity everywhere in the country ", where some of the people more traumatized psychologically than I evaluated in this kind of contextAccording to him, the institution was operating "in flagrant violation of a generalized and growing consensus, nationally and internationally, professional, legal and correctional".

In January 2019, the state of Georgia has accepted an agreement to put an end to the disputeunder which each inmate of the SMU should be allowed to minus four hours a day outside the cells (except weekends and holidays), the time that could not be removed as a form of punishment for common misconduct. Except in a handful of circumstances, a person can not be kept in isolation for more than 24 months.

"The solitary confinement has grown in US prisons since the 1980s and 1990s to control dangerous inmates, punish a crime or protect vulnerable inmates of the population, "NBC News explained. Supermax (super maximum security) where the solitary confinement is common.

In SMU Georgia, Haney interviewed detainees who did not know when or if they would leave isolation to live with other inmates. A lot they directly filled in all their sentences in a minimum space and without human contact.

"Some researchers say that practice causes permanent psychological damagewhile others argue that it is more likely that an inmate will experience problems again by being released, "said NBC. Self-harm and suicide they are the most obvious manifestations of this damage.

Perhaps the best-known case is that of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager in New Yorkwho in 2010 was accused of stealing a backpack. It's happened Three years of non-sentenced custody in Rikers Prison, two of them in solitary confinement. The prosecution did not find enough evidence and its case was dropped. Two years after his release, at the age of 22, Browder was hanged.

Former President Barack Obama has limited solitary confinement in federal prisons and the National Correctional Association of the United States has called for restraint, especially for people suffering from mental illness. In 2018, President Donald Trump promulgated a criminal justice reform prohibiting this form of detention for minors detained in federal centers.

Several trials in different states have resulted in agreements such as the one that benefited Gumm (who continues to be imprisoned for life in a common cell today), and others are underway to limit or ban the use of isolation.