A usual cruel punishment

“Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in ‘supermax’ prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo ‘exercise.’  (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)” – Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”