Imagine this: at 17 years old, you’re caught with heroin in your car. This isn’t the first time, and as your addiction worsens, you fall deeper and deeper into the criminal justice system. By the time you’re 21, you’ve wound up at Tamms Correctional Facility, a super maximum security prison that operated in southern Illinois until this January. You’re denied rehabilitation. Instead, you spend 23 hours a day alone in a soundproof cell. The other hour is spent showering and exercising alone in a different cell. No human contact is allowed, ever.

The main idea is simple: isolation warps the brain. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), solitary confinement not only qualifies as torture, it’s ineffective. According to Human Rights Watch, isolation can be just as stressful as physical torture. Effects include paranoia, depression and psychosis, and access to psychiatrists is often limited to phone calls. For prisoners who already have a mental illness, the effects are especially devastating; a lack of structure or meaningful contact ensures there’s no way for any improvement to be made. Nonetheless, an overcrowded prison system continues to push people into supermax for lesser and lesser crimes. The decision-makers remain unrestrained by accountability because we’ve stopped considering prisoners as people.

As unreasonable as it sounds, it’s not as uncommon as you’d hope. According to the ACLU, 20-year-old David Tracy spent a year in solitary confinement on drug charges before hanging himself. When 17-year-old Brian Nelson was found guilty of armed robbery, he spent years in a New Mexico minimum security prison before being transferred to Tamms, where he remained for 23 years. While supermax prisons were originally designed for short sentences for only the most violent and disruptive criminals, Nelson’s lawyer Alan Mills said Nelson was transferred without formal charges or an explanation.

It’s easy to ignore the out-of-sight, out-of-mind existence of solitary confinement, but that doesn’t stop the suffering experienced there. It’s up to the public to realize that eventually most of the people who experience the torture of solitary confinement will be released back into society, far more broken than they were when they went in.