Deprived of meaningful and sympathetic social contact and interaction with others, the prisoner in solitary confinement may withdraw and regress. Even when isolated prisoners do not show any obvious symptoms, upon release from isolation they can become uncomfortable in social situations and avoid them, with negative consequences for subsequent social functioning in both the prison community and the outside community, again undermining the likelihood of successful resettlement. Reduced activity and stimulation Monotony and reduced sensory stimulation are part and parcel of the experience of isolation. In the isolation prisons of the 19th century, where prisoners had access to work, great care was taken to ensure that they were given intentionally tedious and dull jobs usually performed in silence. In ‘modern’ isolation sections of prisons, work, education or other diversion such as reading material, radio or television, can be withheld or restricted as part of a system of punishment. When work is allocated, it is often conducted inside the cell and, as in the 19th century, can be simple and monotonous, for example stuffing envelopes. Prisoners can be detained in sparsely furnished cells for up to 23 hours a day with little sensory or mental stimulation. Prisoners’ accounts illustrate the effects of monotony and boredom on their mental state during a period of isolation: Boredom is a major enemy. Sensory deprivation is a way of life. There is simply nothing to do. Sit in your bathroom alone with none of your intimate possessions and try to imagine years of it, week after week. Slowly it tears you down, mentally and physically31. The utter and monstrous boredom that becomes so obvious after a short period of isolation is an all-powering one… in order to fight off the tendency to complete idleness and to retain a hold on the senses, it is necessary to make great exertions… Yet no matter how successful a prisoner may be in staving off the effects of... isolation, it is only a matter of time before it catches up with him (Wakefield 1980:28). …you sit in solitary confinement stewing in nothingness, not merely your own nothingness but the nothingness of society, others, the world. The lethargy of months that add up to years in a cell, alone, entwines itself about every ‘physical’ activity of the living body and strangles it slowly to death, the horrible decay of the truly living death. You no longer do push-ups or other physical exercise in your small cell; you no longer pace the four steps back and forth across you cell. You no longer masturbate; you can call forth no vision of eroticism in any form…time descends in your cell like the lid of a coffin in which you lie and watch it as it slowly closes over you… solitary confinement in prison can alter the ontological makeup of a stone (Abbott 1982:44-45). These personal accounts are supported by studies which indicate that reduced sensory input may lead to reduced brain activity. Building on the input-output theory, one study suggested that sensory input and motor-mental output work in parallel: Sourcebook on solitary confinement: The health effects of solitary confinement 19