Pits of Despair Part 3

III

I took my first college Psychology class in 1978. Harry Harlow's unethical experiments on Rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were all the rage. After his wife died of cancer, he shifted his attention to despair and isolation. Upon their birth, he would remove baby monkeys from their mothers and place them into solitary confinement for up to a full year. He observed that by three months, all of the poor critters had withdrawn to the back of these "Pits of Despair," huddled, withdrawn, and without any social skills.

After a year, these "total isolates" hardly moved, did not explore or play, and were unable to have meaningful relationships with other monkeys. They were also bullied. Two of them starved themselves to death.

I am not alone in calling these experiments " unethical." Literary critic Wayne C. Booth wrote in 1974 that "Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance—that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties." In fact, this is the basis of the white torture used against Muslims at Guantanamo Bay after 9/11.

According to Amnesty International, under the auspices of licensed psychologists Army personnel there used "extreme isolation and sensory deprivation ... (on) detainees confined to windowless cells ... days without seeing daylight" with the approval of the George W. Bush administration under the Newspeak, "enhanced interrogation."

Prison officials also use solitary confinement for torture. It is meant to destroy an inmate's sense of identity as punishment. Although Blacks make up just 13% of the population here in the United States, they represent 40% of those currently incarcerated. Which means that they also over-represent those who endure or have endured solitary confinement.

Black and Muslim lives just do not matter to the authorities.