Over the last few weeks, this column space has been dedicated to the ways that minorities have been subjected to unfair policing standards and what the results of that discrimination have been. There is the paranoia that results in the community, the continual sense of distrust that highlights the relationship between the police and the residents. I’ve talked about this enough, and while it is still a major concern, I want to spend some time talking about the place where many minority people end up: prison.

Prison. As a country, we are very familiar with the idea of prison. On any given weekend, you can turn on MSNBC or National Geographic Channel and watch a show about prison; I know that I have. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2.24 million Americans are currently imprisoned. That works out to 716 prisoners per every 100,000 residents. To provide a point of comparison, the next closest country in terms of prisoners is China with a population of 1.64 million. Because China is a nation of over one billion people, this works out to 121 prisoners per every 100,000 residents. As one might be able to reason, we are really good at putting people in jail.

More than putting people in jail, America is good at making people suffer in jail. It is particularly good at making Black people suffer. Study after study has shown that Black people, in particular Black men, are overrepresented within the prison system. While this is a major national problem, I will focus on Minnesota. According to the Council on Crime and Justice, Black people—whether it is due to overpolicing or Black people being predisposed to violence—are a massive section of the prison population, making up 5.2% of the state’s population but 37% of the prison population. This is one of the highest disparities in the country. Given their high numbers behind bars, this means that they are more likely to suffer at the hands of a cruel prison system, a system that punishes rather than rehabilitates. One of the things that many people in prison suffer through is solitary confinement.

If you are not familiar with how solitary confinement works, imagine the following. You are in a room that is about 6 feet by 9 feet. Everything is made out of concrete, including your bed. Whatever is not made out of concrete is made out of stainless steel. If you are lucky, you’ll have a small slit of window that can tell you whether it is 3 pm or 3 am. More likely, you do not have any windows, the fluorescent light above is your only light. You have no books, no radio, no television, no paper. You spend 23 hours of your day in this cell. You do not have contact with anyone at any point in time. The hour that you have out of your cell is spent walking around a small gated enclosure that keeps you separated from your fellow inmates. Sounds pretty miserable, right? This is the reality of solitary confinement.

Although intended to serve as a punishment for other crimes in jails (e.g., assaults on other prisoners), solitary confinement becomes a punishment within itself. While Minnesota does have set limits for how long someone can be in segregation—the average, according to Mother Jones magazine, is 29 days—the limits do not change its psychological effects, primarily because they are not usually followed; prisoners are frequently subjected to months if not years of isolation.

According to psychologist Stuart Grassian—a person who has spent considerable time studying prisoners in isolation—the following are symptoms of extended solitary confinement: psychotic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, depression, hallucinations, paranoia, loss of alertness, and difficulty with thinking. Prisoners in isolation are also known to engage in self-mutilation. More troublingly, prisoners who are in solitary confinement for extended periods of time struggle to interact with other people. Many of these negative effects stay with the prisoners well after they are released from isolation.

This is not a punishment that is limited to the mentally stable adult prison population. Juvenile offenders are often put into solitary confinement for extended stretches of time as well. Take all of the symptoms that are mentioned in the previous paragraph and put those on teenagers. The effect is that these teens can be mentally and emotionally damaged for the remainder of their lives. Mentally ill people have to deal with their own disease as well as the issues that arise from being in such intense confinement. This only creates future problems that the citizenry and police populations have to solve, ones that both groups are mostly unprepared to solve.

There are around 80,000 people suffering through the conditions that I have described here. If you care about the Constitution or the rehabilitative purpose of prison, condemn the practice of solitary confinement and push prison wardens to come up with better, more effective ways to keep control of their populations. That is the only way that this system can be stopped, and prison can return to its original purpose of rehabilitation.