NO HUMAN CONTACT

A grueling account of two longtime federal prisoners held in solitary confinement for many years.

In his latest investigation into the criminal justice system, Earley—whose 1992 book, The Hot House, documented time he spent getting to know the prisoners and guards at infamous Leavenworth Prison—concentrates on Thomas Silverstein, one of the men he got to know at Leavenworth, and Clayton Fountain, another man subjected to long solitary confinement. Both were members of the Aryan Brotherhood, and both committed multiple murders while they were in prison. Fountain died in 2004 after 20 years of solitary confinement, and Silverstein died in 2019 after 36 years in solitary confinement. In the case of Silverstein, Earley makes heavy use of the many pages of documents he wrote describing (and justifying) his life and actions. Regarding Fountain, the author examines the book written about him by a Catholic priest after Fountain's prison conversion to Catholicism and his interviews with criminologist David Ward. The book includes little about the lives of the people who were murdered, and Earley is sympathetic toward his primary subjects and, by extension, others incarcerated in Supermax prisons. As he did in The Hot House and other books, the author makes a strong case that solitary confinement is undeniably inhumane and antithetical to any kind of possible rehabilitation. Silverstein and Fountain were denied human contact for 23 hours per day or more, and they were constantly bathed in light and subjected to uncomfortable physical conditions and other deprivations. Earley’s contention that both men were “unlucky” is less convincing. By his own account, they spent much of their time in the open population plotting how to kill guards and other prisoners, particularly Black inmates in a rival gang. The author describes these killings in gruesome detail, weakening his case that the men shouldn't have been kept separated from other prisoners and from the guards.

More lurid than enlightening.