A Review of “No Human Contact: Solitary Confinement, Maximum security, and Two Inmates Who Changed the System,” by Pete Earley.

About 10 years ago, while working at San Quentin News, I began writing about incarcerated people subjected to solitary confinement in California. My stories covered both Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit, the SHU (pronounced “shoe”), and San Quentin State Prison’s Administrative Segregation. We call that “the hole.” It jarred me, learning how people were forced to live. They described the loneliness and mental breakdowns that occur from extreme isolation and lack of fresh air and sunlight. Their conditions of confinement explained why they wanted out. 

Similarly jarring is Pete Earley’s latest book, “No Human Contact: Solitary Confinement, Maximum Security, and Two Inmates Who Changed the System.” Earley’s reported narrative tells the story of Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, two men associated with the Aryan Brotherhood who each killed a correctional officer, in separate incidents, on the same day, at the then-United States Penitentiary, Marion in Illinois in 1983. 

The crimes so outraged government officials that then-President Ronald Reagan demanded that Congress reinstate a federal death penalty for murders committed inside prisons. The murders justified the construction of the United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado, some 10 years later. Commonly referred to as ADX Florence, it was the nation’s first supermax prison — a place quite literally designed to destroy a human being’s psychological stability via a form of punishment called “no human contact.” Most jarring of all is the extent of our government’s determination, under the guise of public safety, to invoke a cruel, torturous condition on incarcerated people.

Earley is a veteran Washington Post reporter and author of several best-selling non-fiction books, including another book about federal penitentiaries called “The Hothouse: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison.” For “The Hothouse,” Earley was able to spend significant amounts of time inside Leavenworth, observing prison life. “No Human Contact,” by contrast, was not based on observation but rather cobbled together from other sources. Earley did a remarkable job of going through documents, mostly court papers, prison records, and news reports. He conducted intensive interviews with multiple stakeholders to tell a reliable, well-grounded story about Silverstein and ADX. He maintained a decades-long relationship with Silverstein through visits and letters.

Then-Director of the Bureau of Federal Prisons Norman Carlson felt both Silverstein and Fountain should have been executed. Since that was impossible, he chose, as Earley writes, ‘the harshest conditions legally allowed.’

Earley structured “No Human Contact” around Silverstein and Fountain’s incarcerated lives, with additional details on each subject’s upbringing. Readers learn from an interview, for instance, that Silverstein’s mother withheld affection, and his father’s swats reinforced his belief that “violence was not only acceptable, but necessary when establishing dominance,” Silverstein claimed. Fountain talked about being a part of a military family. He glorified the cruelty he learned from his father and military tactics, something he carried into his prison life. 

Earley’s cinematic storytelling contains many concrete details, giving readers an understanding of prison officials’ fear of Silverstein and Fountain, which drove responses to their gang or prison activities—responses that were heavily retributive, punishing, and retaliatory.

As an example, Earley details Silverstein’s November 1987 transfer to an Atlanta federal detention facility to testify at a trial. The facility held exiled Cuban dissidents. A riot ensued, and several guards were taken hostage. Prison officials feared that Silverstein would get involved. In a confidential memo, they described him as “…a psychopathic killer and the most dangerous individual on the compound.”

Then-Director of the Bureau of Federal Prisons Norman Carlson felt both Silverstein and Fountain should have been executed. Since that was impossible, he chose, as Earley writes, “the harshest conditions legally allowed.”

The term “no human contact” sounds as bad as it is. Silverstein described ADX to Earley as a “nightmare.”

“Sitting in your very own personalized coffin, watching yourself rot away, day by day, minute by minute, wondering which part of yourself is first to decay,” Silverstein said. “It is hard to convey how strange it is to be this isolated in a prison, to see and hear no sign of other prisoners. Proximity to others is typically a defining characteristic of prison. Yet… [here] I felt utterly alone.”

But in my 29 years of incarceration, which includes more than 15 years as a journalist, I find that Silverstein’s situation was much like that of the people I’ve interviewed who survived long-term solitary confinement in California. 

The men held for decades at the Pelican Bay SHU eventually went on hunger strike to protest their conditions. The six condemned men housed in San Quentin’s hole filed a lawsuit for relief. Their court papers described people who mutilated themselves in the grossest manners imaginable. Others ended their plight by suicide. The sensory deprivation of their confinement, and not knowing when their insecure lives would get better or end, were inhumane conditions, they argued. It was an existence that no human being could endure indefinitely. The case was settled in September 2015, finally ending indeterminate solitary confinement in California.

I was able to interview these men because they finally made it into the general population. By the time of Silverstein’s death, some believed he was “a changed man” who might have very well also done fine back in regular custody. 

How did you go from being so violent that even your fellow incarcerated person didn’t want you around to becoming a remorseful, nonviolent, and pro-social person? I ask this question considering the perspective of the average law-abiding citizen or the tough-on-crime conservative who would see Silverstein primarily as someone who killed a correctional officer, murdered incarcerated people, and was at war with a Black gang. How can anyone believe it, without feeling duped by an old-school convict?

After reading the book, it struck me that fellow San Quentin resident James Daly might have some answers, and I gave him Earley’s book to read, which he did. I met Daly a couple of years ago, shortly after he arrived in San Quentin to serve a state sentence after finishing one in the federal prison system. Like Silverstein, Daly committed violent acts while in federal prison, fought against Black people, finally ended up in Marion, and ultimately was transferred to ADX for multiple escape attempts. He spent 24 years there. 

According to Daly, everyone at ADX struggled with the isolation and lack of meaningful communication. In his experience, isolation produces three types of men. Some individuals slowly drift into an abyss. They often disconnect, start talking to themselves, and cut themselves or attempt suicide. Meanwhile, others like Daly struggled but managed to avoid falling off that cliff. Daly found himself and came out wanting a better life. But a few sit in their cell, dwelling on the anger and becoming bitter. 

Daly said that surviving the federal prison, Marion, was like “swimming with sharks.” Not a day went by that he felt safe, in part due to the gang violence. Referring to his psychological state, he added, “It was necessary to avoid showing weakness or fear, so I began to compartmentalize my emotions.” He continued, “I still ask myself if the violence there was a by-product of the anger that welled up inside of me, or the psychological impact and sensory deprivation that set in from being in my cell for 22 hours a day.”

He talked about how being in solitary confinement affects one’s thinking: “When a man has lost all hope, he will often become and do things that he wouldn’t normally do. If you spend decades inside a cell, it wears on the mind and changes what you think.” Daly believes that if Silverstein and Fountain had not been in the Control Unit, they wouldn’t have killed those officers. “Being in there, little things bother you. The isolation beyond isolation wears on you,” he reflected.

Once he got to the California prison system, the hardest thing for Daly was being surrounded by people. He had lost some necessary communication and people management skills from only ever being alone. 

Currently, Daly works as a youth mentor. I see him on the tiers of San Quentin, chasing the “kids” around to get them into self-help programs. They drop by his cell, asking him to make rice bowls and burritos — race doesn’t matter now to Daly. When a kid goes sideways, he’s on them with his experience, letting them know that he cares about their future. 

Now, truth be told. I don’t know if the kids know as much as I do about Daly, but I don’t see that person who was ready to kill me, a Black man, 25 years ago. I see a man who demonstrates change every day. It makes me wonder what it would have been like to interview Silverstein.

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Juan Moreno Haines writes from San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in San Quentin, California. Haines serves as editor-in-chief of Solitary Watch.