In 1994, at 26 years of age, Dennis Wayne Hope was placed in solitary confinement in a Texas prison after he had escaped and remained free for 2 months. Until he was recently hospitalized, he had been confined to a dark cell not much bigger than a king-size mattress for the past 27 years. In that time, he had been permitted one personal phone call — in 2013, after his mother died — and had seen virtually no one other than the guards who strip-searched him whenever he was taken, handcuffed, to another room to exercise by himself. According to court documents, he now faces severe depression, paranoid auditory and visual hallucinations, and suicidality. He has written to his lawyers that he fears he may be losing his mind.1

After an appeals court ruled against Hope’s petition to impose limits on solitary confinement as a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court may soon decide whether the quarter-century he has spent subjected to what the United Nations defines […]