A Teen-Ager in Solitary Confinement

Jermaine Gotham was sixteen the first time he was locked in “the box.” He was then an inmate at the Cayuga County Jail, in Auburn, in central New York State, following his arrest on charges of robbery, burglary, and kidnapping. One afternoon in March of last year, after he was written up for entering another inmate’s cell without permission, he was sentenced to sixty days of solitary confinement. A group of corrections officers—Gotham says it was about ten—came to the block where he was being held with other juveniles and transferred him to a solitary cell in the adults’ restrictive-housing unit. The slam of the thick metal door, he remembered, made him feel as if he were in a tomb. He peered through a sliver of light in the door and, for hours, begged the officers to open it. At some point that evening, all the lights went out.