Kiana Calloway spent nearly two decades in prison, entering the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola when he was 17 years old.

For roughly nine of the next 17 years, he was incarcerated in solitary confinement, including a year-and-a-half stint in Angola’s notorious punishment camp, Camp J, for “aggravated disobedience.” 

One Sunday in 1998, he came back from visiting his family in the visiting shed. As usual, he went through the line to be searched on the way back to his dorm, but then was ordered into the security booth for another cavity search. He refused, was charged with “aggravated disobedience” and sent to Camp J.

Image from “Inside, the Valley Sings,” the Oscar-qualified animated film featuring Calloway, by award-winning Irish filmmaker Nathan Fagan.

Even today, 15 years after his release, the darkness from that time feels close.

“Isolation hurts,” said Calloway, now 48. “Isolation puts you in a state of despair, loneliness and darkness.”

His cell door had 28 bars, he says. It’s a detail that held his attention as he spent hours analyzing every inch of the space. Inside, water for the toilet and sink flowed through the same incoming pipe, distracting him from the deafening sound of iron doors and the cries of mental distress around him. 

Even today, if he hears the loud flush of a stainless steel toilet, he is instantly carried back there in his mind.

Calloway, a native of Harvey, doesn’t want anyone else going through that darkness. After his release, he began trying to convince prisons and jails to stop housing people in solitary, through a group called Impacted Solitary Survivors Council, or ISSC. 

His work as a human-rights activist had to start in his own backyard, Calloway said, because Louisiana is the “world’s capital for solitary confinement.”

1 in 5 people held in solitary in Louisiana, one snapshot showed

When the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections conducted a full count in the fall of 2017, 19% of men in state prisons – a total of 2,709 people – reported that they’d been in solitary confinement for more than two weeks, according to Louisiana on Lockdown, a report by Solitary Watch.

The rate of people in solitary in Louisiana was more than double the next state’s average and four times the national average.

Because of ISSC’s advocacy, the DOC expanded out-of-cell time for people held in administrative segregation and changed one of the reasons people were put in solitary: a catch-all category in prison rulebook, called Rule 30, and its subsection, 30W, which allowed people to be held in solitary — known as “the dungeon” —  for weeks at a time for “any behavior … that may impair or threaten the security or stability of the unit or well-being of an employee, visitor, guest, offender or their families.”

But despite any achievements with the DOC, the footprint of solitary confinement within Louisiana seems to be expanding because of the state’s growing network of ICE dentition facilities, some of which are shuttered state prisons repurposed to hold immigrants. Tracking the situation is difficult, because detainees are often transferred quickly, Calloway said. “We don’t really know who’s in there and how many are in there.”. 

Plus, solitary is still widely used in state prisons and local jails, here in Louisiana and across the nation. 

At least 1,222,840 people are locked daily in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails for 22 or more hours a day, according to Calculating Torture, a report by Solitary Watch.

They’re held for months or years at a time — and often for punishment, according to Prison Policy Initiative research.

But even short stays in solitary confinement can have serious psychological and physical effects.

That puts people with mental-health conditions in grave danger, said Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans who studies death in jails and prisons through the Incarceration Transparency project. “The number of completed suicides that are occurring in segregation or solitary cells is really astounding,” she said.

Lasting effects as brains change from solitary

Albert Woodfox

Depth perception in vision vanished for Angola 3 member Albert Woodfox, who spent 43 years in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell – as recounted in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. 

Woodfox’s physical impacts went far beyond the terms of his imprisonment, Armstrong emphasizes. “Nobody ever sentenced him to losing a portion of his eyesight because of the conditions in which he was housed.”

Those beyond-punishment effects are part of the reason that the United Nations takes the position that “prolonged” solitary confinement, for more than 15 consecutive days, amounts to psychological torture.

Long after release, people suffer long-term effects because of sensory deprivation and exposure to extremes. The brain itself changes during solitary confinement. If the brain has little stimulation, it creates its own distortions. If it is exposed to extremes like bright lights ir loud noise, the brain heightens or blurs its reactions to outside stimuli.

As Calloway stared at the blank wall, he used to transport himself. “I used to be at my brother’s football games,” he says in the animated movie, “Inside, the Valley Sings.”

For a long time, the way Calloway perceived the world was altered. “By being in a cell so long, it took time for my eyes to dilate properly,” he said. 

His hearing too, suffered. “It took a while for my ears to get back adapted to hearing birds chirping or the small things.” 

Woodfox and the other two members of the Angola Three, Herman Wallace and Robert Hillary King, became known worldwide for their philosophical responses to spending most of their adult lives in solitary. As Woodfox wrote, he had seen the worst, but chose to hold onto the good. “I have witnessed the horrors of man’s cruelty to man. I did not lose my humanity,” Woodfox wrote. “I bear the scars of beatings, loneliness, isolation and persecution. I am also marked by every kindness.” 

Calloway, who was mentored by Woodfox, remembers his focus on the positive. “Every day, in Camp J, he would be the first to pop up and tell everyone ‘Good morning,’” he said. “At night, he’d tell everyone ‘Good evening.’” 

Similarly, Calloway focused his mind on thinking through big topics and imagining better places. “Your mind is one thing that can’t be put in shackles and handcuffs,” he said. “If I didn’t have the opportunity to harness my mind and my imagination, to think that something good would come out of this, I would be one of the many people who lost their minds in there.”

Touring solitary-confinement bus stops at Loyola 

Recently, a social-justice bus called “Journey to Justice” stopped at Loyola University for a day, as part of a national tour to end solitary confinement. The bus contained some exhibits and a cell replicating the exact size and furnishings of a solitary cell. 

Calloway, who works at the Jesuit Social Research Institute on the Loyola campus, spoke with students and local residents as part of the visit. The goal was “humanizing what incarceration looks like” and helping students see that they can push for change, he said. 

Naquasia Jones, 42, the outreach coordinator for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture survivors’ network, also spoke at Loyola about her time in prison, which included 60 days in solitary at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York, when her only human contact was with correctional officers. 

While in Bedford Hills, Jones also spent an entire year on lockdown – when an entire tier is “locked down” for 23 hours, given only one hour of yard-phone-shower time each day. The time tested her mental strength, she said. “It’s designed to break you.”

Some Loyola students walked out of the Journey to Justice bus feeling profound effects.

“They’re allowed to do that to people? It just feels very wrong. Tortuous and inhumane,” said Indie Petitto, 20, a Loyola senior, who walked into the solitary cell and read through the Journey to Justice exhibits about the practice. 

Petitto felt physically weak. “As I was on the bus, I felt my legs shaking the whole time,” she said.

As a teen, Calloway is placed directly in solitary

In 1994, when Calloway was 16, he was arrested and wrongfully charged with robbing and killing a pregnant woman and her boyfriend in the Woodmere subdivision in Harvey. 

In 1996, he was convicted of first-degree murder, given a life sentence, and shipped from Jefferson Parish jail to Angola. 

Kiana Calloway on the Journey to Justice bus. (Photo by Gus Bennett | The Lens)

Once there, he moved in and out of “ad seg,” administrative segregation, a working cell-block where he served time alone or with one cellmate. He was sent to the cell-blocks for a range of reasons, often small. For instance, when he was in the fields, he was ordered to pick okra, which sent his arms itching to the point where he refused to continue. 

He was often in and out of the cell-block. For not having his shoes lined up under his bed. For having too many cans of tunafish. And for making a three-way phone call, asking his mom to call his brother. 

That’s important to understand, Armstrong said. “I think the public thinks about solitary as a place exclusively for people who have serious or significant disciplinary issues. Instead, she said, “people are housed in solitary for a number of reasons — suicide watch, protective custody, medical issues, administrative detention, or even minor offenses.”

Calloway learned how to pull himself back whenever he lost hope. But the depth of his despair often tugged at him.  “There have been many times where I deemed like ‘Why am I here? I should just kill myself.’”

“Once the bars close, you’re in a cell by yourself. No access to mail, the air, or civilization in no way shape form or fashion, Calloway says in “Inside, the Valley Sings.”

The isolation units were narrow cells with solid concrete walls on three sides and bars on the fourth side, at the front, next to the door with 28 bars.

He was only allowed a limited amount of personal belongings – an orange jumper, shower slippers, and underwear. 

Because of the prevalence of mental illness in Camp J, some men became known for strange behavior. “Some individuals would start throwing human feces or urine throughout the cell,” Calloway said. Others would make darts and let them sit in human feces for weeks at a time. If a dart pierced the skin, it could cause gangrene, other Camp J residents discovered. 

“There were times, man, when I would wake up in the middle of the night to individuals bamming their heads on the walls. Boom, boom, boom,” Calloway said. “From the outside looking in, you can see the individuals are dealing with mental-health issues. Why are they in these cells?”

Twenty-three hours in, one hour out
In solitary, there are no classes or programs. Each man is allowed only one hour out of his cell daily to make a phone call or take a shower after 23 hours inside the cell, a schedule known as 23-1. 

 “I used to freeze time by looking into the wall, just sitting, staring,” says Calloway in the new animated movie, “Inside, the Valley Sings,” which plumbs the role of imagination for those in solitary.

“I think of solitary as like a prison within a prison,” Armstrong said. “It is one of the most highly controlled spaces. Often, you’re not allowed to have pens or pencils or regular bed sheets. And yet, despite that control, in our data, we see that a substantial portion of suicides are occurring in solitary cells, particularly in jails.”

The harms of solitary confinement were carried over from another system that routinely used solitary to punish Black people: enslavement. In the book Twelve Years a Slave, for instance, Solomon Northrop was kept chained in isolation.

“The systems are structured and designed to deteriorate and demoralize the individual,” Calloway said. “We know that incarceration is a direct descendant of slavery. In appearance, Angola, Louisiana, still looks like a slave plantation. They didn’t change the name — just turned it into a prison.”

Working to reform policies that lead to solitary confinement

Calloway’s conviction was overturned in 1998, after the Louisiana Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal in Gretna granted post-conviction relief, vacating his first-degree murder convictions and life sentences, and remanding the case for a new trial. This led to follow-up trials and a manslaughter conviction with a 34-year prison sentence. He would serve 17 years before he was granted parole.

After his release in 2011, Calloway began working with the Jesuit Social Research Institute to help the DOC rethink disciplinary policies and support those who have endured solitary confinement.

“Locking up individuals inside cages and expecting them to come home ready to function, that’s a threat to public safety,” he said.

A man released home to Jefferson Parish directly from extended lockdown at Allen Correctional Center about a decade ago serves as a tragic reminder of the continued harms of lockdown. Within months of the man’s release, Calloway saw the man on TV news, arrested for killing his girlfriend and her children, Calloway said.

After that tragedy, the Department of Public Safety acknowledged that releasing people directly from solitary onto the street was an issue — “and the only reason they knew that was because they were tracking their own operations,” said Armstrong, who believes that DOC data on solitary’s use — and its effects — should be released, to enhance public safety.

These days, within and outside of his work, Calloway’s life is broad and wide and accomplished.

He has worked on Inside, the Valley Sings, an animated film that’s on the long list to be nominated for an Oscar in 2026. A different film, a feature documentary called Kiana’s Mission, is now complete and will be screened in the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. 

And across the state, Calloway now trains formerly incarcerated people to lead reform efforts focused on rehabilitation. That work includes a digital tool designed to guide people returning home. “If we invest in building people and divest from harming them we’ll have a better society,” he said.

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