The depth of imprisonment and the dilution of self

Introduction

At the time of the interview, 34-year-old Anton ¹ had been isolated in his prison cell for eight months, a state he described as a form of ‘cooling’:

Anton: I’ve noticed that it's very rare that I- I can access my emotions anymore… Being isolated, it- it puts a very big plug in it… I can’t actually remember the last time I let myself be affected by my emotions. Normally, I used to be able to shed a tear if I saw an emotional movie, right? Not sobbing, but- you know. I could become- like genuinely happy for someone else, or from something I saw, like overwhelmed with happiness and shed a tear. I can’t do that anymore. You become-… You become sort of indifferent to everything, right?

Anton loved to read and felt particularly in touch with himself when he wrote poetry. He saw himself as a ‘very sensitive person’; different from other prisoners, who were ‘bullies’ he had nothing in common with. Yet, throughout Anton's story, he described how he now experienced his emotions with both less variety and intensity, having become a ‘colder’ version of himself. In this way, he identified solitary confinement as more than just a process of emotional blunting. His response to prolonged isolation not only involved the suppression of painful emotions to endure the trauma of his situation (see Crewe, 2024); it also robbed him of some of the qualities he most liked about himself.

Anton had been sentenced for violent offences on several occasions, and he described how becoming ‘colder’ was part of each of these imprisonments. However, his current spell of isolation had accelerated and intensified this withdrawal from his emotional self: ‘it makes that process longer, faster, it's doubled up’. As a result, he felt pushed progressively further from the parts of himself that he felt were most valuable and authentic, the very core of who he was. That is, the suppression of emotions caused by isolation not only constituted a form of coping (Crewe, 2024), but also reshaped Anton's self-understanding and his experience of the world around him.

In this article, we seek to understand the experiences of people who voluntarily agree to live out their time in prison in isolation by drawing on and expanding the concept of the ‘depth of imprisonment’ (Crewe, 2011, 2021; Downes, 1988; King and McDermott, 1995). Depth is essentially a spatial abstraction that refers to the relative distance between the current state of imprisonment and an outset position, the surface (Crewe, 2021; Ugelvik and Damsa, 2018). A key – and perhaps the most literal – aspect of depth is the level of security and control that a prisoner experiences, and the degree to which, as a result, they feel ‘swallowed’ or ‘consumed’ by their imprisonment (Hayes 2023: 4), or separated from normality. Accordingly, the contribution of our article is to emphasise that this normality, and the impact of deep confinement, may relate not only to a prisoner's physical and symbolic distance from the community, or from other prisoners, but also – as in Anton's account – internally from their existing sense of self.

The article begins by explaining the original construct and development of the concept of depth. It then describes the practice of voluntary isolation in Denmark and the methodological basis of this study. The analysis that follows describes how prisoners narrated their experiences of voluntary isolation as deep forms of confinement, both externally and internally. In doing so, it draws attention to how prisoners described an erosion of selfhood and a gradual impediment of their ability to make sense of who they were or who they wanted to become. This analysis also suggests that the experience of depth is conveyed by prisoners in terms of a sense of existential free fall and a potentially endless descent. Empirically, the lens of depth helps us to identify the particularly acute effects of voluntary isolation, including the special terror of not knowing how or when deep conditions will cease. Theoretically, the findings raise questions about how to understand the endpoint of depth, and hence whether the concept relates not only to a surface, but also to a floor. The article concludes with a discussion of where this leaves the concept of depth, and its implications both for future research and for practice.

Depth, distance, surface and self

The ‘depth of imprisonment’ was first theorised by David Downes, with reference to the extent to which imprisonment felt ‘damaging and repressive’ (1988: 166). This included aspects like staff relations, rights and privileges, material conditions and the overall quality of life, which the prison regime made possible or withheld. His subsequent revision emphasised ‘permeability’ (1992: 15), expressed in terms of the openness or porosity of a prison, through visits, home leave, calls, letters and information. King and McDermott (1995) expanded on this by highlighting the importance of security and control measures, such as walls, bars, searches and supervision in maintaining order and limiting liberty, noting that a prisoner's security categorisation was a key determinant of their prison experience.

In recent years, Crewe has developed the concept of depth, defining it as ‘the degree of control, isolation, and difference from the outside world’ (2021: 336), or the ‘distance’ or ‘polarity’ between the prison and the world beyond its walls (2015: 54). In its most simple form, the term helps to classify different types of penal institutions based on their level of security and control (Crewe et al., 2023), with open prisons being ‘shallow’ (Pakes, 2023) and high-security prisons considered ‘deep custody’ (Shalev and Edgar, 2015). In this respect, depth implies ‘being “underground” or immersed, far from the surface of freedom, or in an alien situation, almost helpless’ (Crewe et al., 2023: 206). Accordingly, Hayes suggests that depth is best thought of as ‘how totally the penal regime imposed upon the subject consumes them’, understanding it as the ‘swallowing’ of the prisoner, ‘which isolate and separate the offender from the non-penal world’ (2023: 4).

Yet the relationship between depth and pain is not linear: open prisons might in some respects feel deep because they expose prisoners to the outside world (Shammas, 2014), making the distance from freedom feel greater (Crewe, 2015). Meanwhile, prisoners held in environments that are objectively extremely deep sometimes describe themselves as liberated or un-constrained, at least existentially (Crewe et al., 2023). In Crewe's interpretation, then, depth is not only about physical restriction, but also the psychological and sensory impression of imprisonment, encompassing both its objective characteristics and the way it is experienced subjectively (Crewe, 2025).

Adding a further layer to this interpretation, Ugelvik and Damsa (2018) argue that many foreign national prisoners experience unique forms of depth, since even in prisons that are objectively ‘shallow’, the world that often matters to them – their home country – remains so far away. Accordingly, depth is clearly about experiencing profound psychological and emotional distance and uncertainty about the future, but this experience relates to the positionality of the prisoner; ‘shaped by the nature of their existence prior to their confinement and their expectations of the world to which they will return’ (Crewe, 2021: 338). In other words, the experience of depth is not situated exclusively within the prison, but in relation to the broader lifeworld and history of the prisoner. Because distance and surface are in this respect relative, it is essential to uncover the states to which prisoners are comparing their incarceration, whether in the form of lived experiences or imaginations about past, present and future.

To move closer to this subjective experience of depth, Crewe (2021) outlines a range of metaphors that prisoners use to convey their experiences of being confined. The most common metaphors liken imprisonment to hell, a box, a coffin, a bubble and submersion, each of which highlight different ways in which imprisonment represents the sense of ‘being elsewhere’ (p. 345). Such metaphors provide help to communicate the ‘textural qualities’ of imprisonment (p. 340), that is, how deep forms of confinement – such as voluntary isolation – essentially feel. In this regard, depth serves not just as an abstract concept but as a way of capturing the phenomenology of imprisonment.

While the concept of depth has been qualified in multiple ways in regards to the pain brought on by alienation from others, as argued above, less attention had been paid to the ways in which it may operate internally, for example as an alienation from self. This conception, however, lends itself to broader sociological scholarship, that has demonstrated how the self, in its capacity to be both interpretive and projective, may be in conflict with itself. It may operate in ways where one's self-understanding no longer aligns with one's actions, where one feels colonised by something alien or inauthentic, and where the painful act of dismissing or discarding parts of one's identity results in a disorientating loss of self-recognition (for a conceptual overview, see Jaeggi, 2014). Adding to the literature on depth, then, is a focus on how particular forms of captivity, such as solitary confinement, may not only place the individual in a specific relationship to the institution or the free world, but potentially also to themselves.

A large body of studies have substantiated the many harmful effects of isolation in prison (for a review, see Brasholt et al., 2023), also in Danish prison populations (see e.g. Wildeman and Andersen, 2020a, 2020b). These include adverse effects to the health of the prisoner and a range of post-release effects, such as heightened mortality. The harm of solitary confinement has thus been shown to have lasting consequences to the life of prisoners. This damage is typically operationalised in clinical ways designed for statistical analysis or legal documentation. With this article, we suggest thinking of harm in also more qualitative ways, including the harm done to a subjective sense of selfhood. These subjective accounts are germane in relation to isolation, because, as O’Donnell (2014) suggests, solitude in prison is a complex and layered phenomenon to which people respond differently. Its psychological and emotional oppressiveness, he argues, can foster a profound transformation in individuals, bringing them into a new relationship with themselves. Although solitary confinement is normally associated with a range of negative effects, including anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations and suicidal ideation, some prisoners actively seek out isolation and adapt to its deprived conditions, finding avenues for self-reflection and personal growth (Laws, 2021). These developments are facilitated by the absence of external stimuli and social interactions, which forces individuals to turn inward. Despite the harmfulness of isolation, some prisoners find clarity of thought, hope and a redefined sense of self (Laws, 2022). Although less sanguine, internal depth suggests some of the same mechanisms. As we describe below, the lack of sociality makes the self both precarious and persistent, everywhere and nowhere. Before illustrating this, we briefly outline the practice of voluntary isolation and how we understand it in terms of depth.

The case of voluntary isolation

As with Nordic penality generally (Pratt, 2008; Pratt and Eriksson, 2013), prisons in Denmark tend to be characterised as rights-based and less harsh than those in other jurisdictions. Yet Nordic prisons have also been criticised for their use of pre-trial detention and solitary confinement (Lönnqvist and Smith, under review; Reiter et al., 2018), and a number of scholars have pointed to solitary confinement more generally as a particular and common form of depth (Shalev and Edgar, 2015).

Because solitary confinement is a restraint imposed upon the prisoner, and has been proven to cause harm, it is subject to strict administrative controls and measures in Danish prisons (Taxhjelm and Kessing, 2025). In contrast, voluntary isolation is legally framed as a positive right of the prisoner, a freedom from the prisoner society, reflecting the state's commitment to prisoners’ autonomy and the protection of their rights (Engbo, 2019). Following section 33(3) of the Sentence Enforcement Act, a prison sentence in Denmark may be served with or without association, granting prisoners the right to seek isolation if conditions allow and to terminate it at their own request. Yet because the practice principally rests on an assumption of free choice and informed consent, voluntary isolation is unregulated, meaning that no specific rules govern its use. Formally known as ‘voluntary exclusion from association’, isolation can therefore continue for years without necessitating institutional intervention.

However, as suggested by previous research (Taxhjelm, 2025), prisoners who voluntarily isolate rarely regard this choice as fully voluntary. Wanting to leave a gang, being victimised in the yard, having a marginal position in the prisoner hierarchy, or being advised to segregate by members of staff are all pathways into voluntary isolation, mainly as an acute means of ensuring safety. Few prisoners who choose isolation therefore envision staying there for very long, but end up doing so for the lack of a better alternative (Taxhjelm, 2025). In their eyes, isolation thus reflects systemic failure rather than the un-bounded personal preference that voluntarism assumes. As the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture concluded: ‘prisoners who seek protection receive isolation’ (CPT, 2002: 16). Several international human rights bodies have consequently criticised the practice, recommending its abolition or regulation to align with international standards. None of these recommendations have been implemented. In other words, because the practice is wholly understood as a right of the individual prisoner, there are no legal safeguards to either limit the length of isolation or to reduce its harm (Taxhjelm and Kessing, 2025).

The prisoners who choose to isolate experience a range of restrictions relating to depth. ² They are cut off from most or all recreational and rehabilitative initiatives, including programs, sports, education and most forms of work, and are typically located in a specific part of the establishment, such as a solitary confinement unit. Although prison management are not required to implement harm reducing measures, they may do so at their own discretion, for example allowing the voluntarily isolated to spend their daily hour outdoors with another isolated prisoner. Those housed in an open or closed prison may also be allowed one hour to cook themselves a hot meal. Subject to risk assessment, some prisoners may also be offered to spend a couple of hours in the cell with another voluntarily isolated prisoner. Because no legal framework governs these initiatives, there is considerable variation in practice (as also identified by The Danish Parliamentary Ombudsman (2019), based on several inspections), and therefore no reliable overview of standards.

Voluntary isolation in Denmark exists at all prison security levels, and in both local, open and closed prisons. Around 6% of the prison population has at one time chosen to isolate themselves and about half of these isolations are shorter than 14 consecutive days (Taxhjelm and Kessing, 2025). It is quite possible that prisoners who self-segregate for a couple of days may experience some of the benefits of solitude in an otherwise crowded environment (Laws, 2021, 2022; see also, Schliehe et al., 2022), whereas this article is concerned with the experiences of prolonged isolation.

Methods

This study draws on 29 qualitative interviews undertaken with prisoners who had chosen to isolate voluntarily, and which formed part of a larger research project conducted by the first author of this article. The nature of voluntary isolation exacerbated the methodological and ethical complexities of engaging with a hard-to-reach and potentially vulnerable population. Consequently, the research design necessitated careful planning, and an extensive approval process through the Department of the Danish Prisons and Probation Service.

The regional offices of the Danish Prisons and Probation Service identified a relevant member of staff in the institutions that agreed to take part in the study, who distributed consent forms and information letters to all prisoners who were voluntarily isolated. These documents outlined the study's objectives and participants’ rights, should they choose to take part. Prisoners in seven institutions consented to being interviewed, including local, low-security and high-security prisons, covering all five regions of Denmark. No selection criteria were applied beyond the core sampling criteria of voluntary isolation, and institutions were requested to refrain from imposing their own criteria. The manager supplied information on the number of signed consent forms, based on which appointments were made. We have no reason to believe that this sample was manipulated in any way. Conducted face-to-face, they took place in rooms set aside for social or legal visits. Because of the isolated status of the interviewees, participants were escorted to this room by a prison officer, but no members of staff were present during interviews, nor could they listen in on or surveil the conversation.

Key information was reiterated at the beginning of each interview, confirming each individual's status as voluntarily isolated and their consent to taking part in the interview and being audio-recorded. Because of the distressing nature of some prisoners’ situation, consent was also reaffirmed multiple times throughout. Repeatedly, interviewees were informed that they remained free to terminate the interview at any time, that interviews could be paused, or that they could decline to discuss any themes and questions. However, only a few interviews concluded prematurely and this was mainly due to the physical toll of conversation, with isolation having made these men unaccustomed to talking, as they explained. Most interviewees insisted on sharing their story, and were reluctant to conclude the interview, as they recognised this as a rare source of agency in an otherwise difficult and lonely existence. ‘You’re the first ones to listen’, as several of them said.

The length of the interviews ranged from one to one-and-a-half hours, with some extending longer. As some scholarship has recommended, the interview was conducted with a co-interviewer ³ (see e.g., King & Liebling, 2008). The interviews benefitted from the presence of two interviewers, enhancing the depth and quality of the dialogue, while also dispersing the emotional demands of the research process. As a lot of the men were deeply frustrated by their circumstances, some actively sought out the attention of the female co-interviewer, seeing in her a source of care or comfort that was perhaps less culturally intelligible in the primary interviewer, who was male. There was no indication that interviewees found the presence of two interviewees difficult or exhausting to manage.

The 29 interviewees were all male, but had a wide array of backgrounds. Sixteen had been charged or convicted of a violent offence and eight of a sexual offence. Most were aged between 25 and 44, five were younger, and six were older. Nine were on remand, while 20 had been convicted. Eight of the men had ethnic minority backgrounds, while the remaining 21 were ethnic Danes. Eleven of the men had been isolated for more than half a year, and due to the slow recruitment process, no interviewees had been isolated for less than two weeks. In this regard, the interview sample was well attuned to the experiences of prolonged voluntary isolation.

Given the ethical implications of engaging with individuals who were acutely isolated, the interviews were designed as open invitations for participants to discuss any topics they felt were important. Nonetheless, the interviews focused primarily on the factors leading to their decision to isolate, their prior knowledge of isolation, the alignment of their expectations with the reality of daily life in isolation and their feelings about remaining segregated. All interviews were transcribed and subsequently coded in NVivo.

External and internal depth

The attention of this article on internal forms of depth does not reflect the absence of representations of external distance. In fact, the interviews were filled with stories that gave voice to the pain that arose from feeling far away from other prisoners, the prison society and the outside world. Such descriptions were typically fused with a general sense of injustice regarding the voluntary nature of the choice to self-isolate. Many men renamed the practice ‘involuntary’, ‘forced’ or ‘unwarranted’ and drew on imagery – for example, of locks or straitjackets – to depict a form of coerced immobility, reflecting the lack of agency they felt characterised their life. Most men therefore felt trapped and did so in an entirely surreal environment. As a result, they went to great lengths in trying to access the world beyond their confinement:

Nikolaj: Instead of just looking straight out the window, where you can really only see the top of that building there (points out the window), that's what I’m able to see, you figure out that if you do it sort of tilted, you can see a little bit of a tree… You do these sorts of things. Also ring the bell to go to the toilet, so that you can stand on the toilet and look out that window instead. You’ll do anything to escape the cell. Don’t tell the officers, but sometimes, at night, I deliberately ring them and they’ll lock me in the toilet, so I just stand there, waiting, for an hour or something like that on top of the toilet. I feel mad for just telling you, I mean, but that's how far I’ll go to look out a window.

To assure himself that there was still something out there to return to and to which he belonged, Nikolaj tried to maximise time out of his cell, and minimise the separation between himself and the outside world, if only in spirit. Yet these moments of respite (Crewe et al., 2014) were infrequent and insufficient, which in his own words left him ‘sucked down’, swallowed by the ‘black hole’ of isolation.

Suffering in isolation hence emanates from feeling far away, distanced not only from society but also from something as simple as a tree, from surroundings that feel organic and natural. These descriptions resonate with classical representations of how and why deep forms of confinement are painful. Left entirely to themselves, one of the main concerns of voluntarily isolated prisoners, however, is not only how they feel distanced from the outside world but also from their internal being.

Inaccessible and uncontainable selves

In the introduction, Anton characterised isolation as ‘cooling’ and described how his self was increasingly ‘walled in’: it had become more and more difficult to access who he was or how he was feeling, and he had become alienated from a more emotional form of selfhood. Others described a different, but equally destructive, experience, using metaphors of force or pressure that had ‘snapped’ or ‘broken’ their sense of self, making it increasingly difficult to contain themselves. This was described as losing one's ‘shell’ and a sense of control, or no longer having an emotional ‘barrier’ or ‘filter’. Alexander described having ‘thirsty eyes’ from having cried so much: ‘sometimes I just cry on the inside instead’. To some, this emotional ‘softening’ (Crewe, 2024: 8) or disintegration did not correspond with their sense of masculinity and severely challenged who they understood themselves to be. Sebastian, for example, described isolation as having ‘cracked’ him:

Sebastian: Now, I man-cry. Because it's like this for men, you know, like man-flu and all this, once the gates are open, it just (mimicking explosion)… in a way it's sort of pathetic, right? I used to hold back, but I can’t- I’ve completely given up on that. Completely let go. I cry.

To Sebastian, being unable to contain the visible signs of his distress was deeply uncomfortable, making him feel ‘weak’, defeated and alienated from the capable man he saw himself as. To several men, this emotional excess and inner dissonance was hence connected to ideals of strength they no longer could live up to. Others presented their self as being dominated by anger or occupied by intrusive thoughts. After two months of isolation, Oliver felt increasingly ‘fiery and more aggressive’. When he chose to leave the gang he had belonged to for years and isolated, ‘I was just so scared’, but now ‘I’ve become even more aggressive than I already was. I really feel it… It's bad. It's really bad… I can really feel it, on my mood, like, it just swings… a lot’.

To try to ‘master time’ (O’Donnell, 2014), Oliver had built a routine for himself, doing exactly the same thing every day, the highlight of which was writing a letter to his wife, even if it was never to be sent. Yet despite all these efforts to manage the temporality of isolation, a surfeit of time on his own exposed him to unwanted thoughts:

Oliver: You get sick from staying here this long. I’m in danger. Like, real danger… It's not like I’ve done shit. They just put me on hold… They just left me to myself.

Central to his experience, isolation seemed entirely disproportional – he was clearly recognised as someone needing protection and yet was only offered isolation detrimental to his health. Oliver had previously been in disciplinary solitary confinement multiple times, but voluntary isolation was in his own words ‘much worse’, namely because it was ‘meaningless’, which left him consumed by anger.

These accounts highlight the harmful impact of isolation on prisoners’ emotional selfhood. Just as the prisoners in Laws’ (2022) study used metaphors of hydraulics and fluidity to describe their emotional states, some men described feelings of ‘cooling’ – emotional flatness and existential numbness – while others talked in terms of ‘pressure’ – emotional outbursts, loss of control and unstoppable crying. The self was either enclosed by thickened walls and inaccessible, or was fractured and uncontainable.

Yet, as we now explain, several prisoners detailed how a particular relationship with the self could make depth desirable.

The swallowing of the self

After half a year of voluntary isolation, Anton had been presented with the opportunity to move to a cell on a higher level with clear views overlooking a field. Yet he chose to decline this offer, remaining in a much darker cell facing the courtyard, with angled shutters that made it impossible to look out of his window properly.

Anton: I don’t want to be reminded how my life could have been, I’m doing my time here now and I’ll probably be here for the next eight-to-ten years… You just sort of give up, right? Like they give up on you… Perhaps it's because it's easier to make that decision when there is nothing, than- than when everything is there… But, yeah… It still hurts, because… there is nothing.

Deep forms of confinement are undoubtedly harmful. In Anton's words, they ‘hurt’. However, he also points to some of the reasons why prisoners may accept such conditions or even actively seek them out. Anton continuously narrated his life in frames of loss: lost time in isolation, lost hope of a ‘normal life just doing normal stuff’, a lost childhood characterised by ‘institutions, foster homes, shelters and then youth prison’, the lost connection to his parents, and a loss of faith in the system's ability to help him. Being in isolation was part of, what he called, his ‘pattern of life’, and it was his consistent experience of loss that meant that, for Anton, being distanced from the surface could feel preferable to being able to access it, even if only in minimal forms: ‘Because I’ve lost so much in my life, remembering- thinking of freedom, of normality, it's painful in its own way’.

In this reading, Anton had lost the will to try to protect himself from being ‘swallowed’ (Hayes, 2023) by his circumstances. This was entirely different from how he imagined ‘normal people’ would respond to isolation. Whereas Anton believed they would be filled with feelings of uncertainty, fearing the lingering of time and everything that faced them, ‘I know it all’. In this way, he felt that all his previous periods of imprisonment had already ‘destroyed’ his inner life, as a result of which he chose to stay isolated in his dark cell; ‘because with my experience and my way of thinking, the way I’ve developed here, I don’t belong among others’. He was no longer ‘a normal person’ to whom depth was highly undesirable. The surface of his life so distant, his future was something he had ‘stopped thinking about long ago’:

Anton: Everyone else, they moved on, right? With their lives… It's as if, Anton he doesn’t exist anymore. Like as if he can never, not even one day, be by their side again in a good way… That's why (pause), that's why I’ve said that I don’t want to talk to anyone.

The softer, warmer Anton was now only a distant memory. The person that he wanted to be, the person that he had been, and who existed in the life of others ‘in a good way’, felt forever changed. With this, Anton's portrayal of past, present and future showcases the many subjective elements to depth and how such narrative components reshape the experience of isolation.

Other men shared this sense of having a degraded self, and therefore of finding isolation somewhat desirable. One such example was the group of men charged with or convicted of sexual offences, who were advised by officers to choose isolation in order to secure their safety from other prisoners. Such men, like Marcus, recognised that their crime was regarded as ‘worse than anything else’, and saw no alternatives to isolation, often compounding a form of seclusion that they were already inclined to impose upon themselves: ‘If they knew what I’ve done, then they probably- probably… yeah… wouldn’t want to spend time with me anyway’. Some men hereby accepted having to stay isolated and felt that they deserved to experience loss and abandonment. Voluntary isolation served to render them invisible, buried in the deepest pit of the prison (see also Ievins, 2023). In this respect, voluntary isolation was the bottom of the prison morally as well as spatially. As Marcus said about his choice to isolate: ‘I just don’t want to be noticed, really, I just want to be small’.

As suggested, these men were wracked by feelings of shame and guilt. The harshness of their conditions thus became a mirror of the moral punishment they felt they deserved, and voluntary isolation was a means of turning aggression or violence inwards. Freighted with stigma, and unable to protect themselves outside conditions of segregation, the depth of their confinement reproduced the logic of the system, exacerbated their loneliness and distress, and entailed a moral distancing from themselves.

Despite such levels of isolation, several men declined the few social opportunities that the prison presented them with, for example, to share their hourly yard time with another voluntarily isolated prisoner. Silas, who was in pre-trial detention for a suspected sexual offence and had voluntarily isolated for nine months, was convinced that in the eyes of the prosecutor and the court it would reflect poorly on him and would constitute an admission of guilt if he in any way were to be ‘associated with other criminals’, especially ‘if they are sex offenders’. In this way, some men effectively deepened their own confinement.

Precious and oppressive selves

Entering into voluntary isolation immediately raised the pressing question of when to exit it again. This propelled an introspective dialogue centred around a profound will to cling to and maintain one's own humanity and sense of selfhood. Mainly in isolation because of exploitation, assaults or threats, the men in many ways experienced themselves as victims. The range of security measures that enacted their deep confinement, however, produced a feeling of being punished rather than protected (Taxhjelm, 2025). As Mads said: ‘You know, the negative about isolation is that suddenly it's as if you’re made into this person that's all wrong’. One way in which prisoners become distanced from their self-understanding is hence through interpreting their conditions of isolation as communicating personal blame or some kind of danger that they posed to others:

Victor: I’ve told them! You can’t just- I’m not some Peter Lundin type or just some sick mass murderer that you- you- can just lock up and throw in some dark dungeon for two years and then that's it. I can’t take that. I mean- I’m used to being out- I’m just a kid.

Victor's introduction of Peter Lundin – a notorious murderer labelled ‘the face of evil’ by Danish Police – illuminated how he experienced voluntary isolation as entirely inhumane and undeserved. The only way his confinement made sense to Victor was if the conditions of isolation related to the safety of others (because he was dangerous, i.e., ‘some sick mass murderer’), and not because he needed to be protected (because he was vulnerable, i.e., ‘just a kid’). Men like Victor hereby struggled to understand why the form of confinement to which they had committed themselves needed to be so excruciating and corrosive: ‘With each day, I feel like losing a chip of my confidence and my personality’, he said.

Such pains beg an explanation of why prisoners sought out isolation. Yet, for many men, it was less a choice than the only viable option available to them. Most wanted to leave, but felt trapped or smothered by it. Elias had been victimised on the wing and stayed out of fear, describing this choice as being ‘like a heavy blanket that is thrown on me’. A few had initially chosen to isolate to escape the noise and chaos of the wings, or ‘to stay out of trouble’. Christian, for example, tried to remove himself from being caught up in conflicts that might result in the revocation of privileges and additional punishment. Initially, then, segregation was liberating (Laws, 2021; O’Donnell, 2014), allowing him to ‘catch my breath’. Yet after several months, it had come to feel overwhelming, like ‘meaninglessness and hopelessness washing in over me’. He had sought out a deep solution to his penal problems, only to find that these solutions had unexpected personal and existential implications.

Isolation therefore left prisoners with an intense and disorientating confrontation with themselves:

Interviewer: What do you think it [isolation] does to you? How can you tell?

Gustav: Well- I- (deep sigh)- I cry all the time. First of all… I think it's hard… collecting myself around a thought… (sigh)… My nights typically end up in- like a lot of racing thoughts, where I might fall asleep, but I’ll wake up the entire night and I’m actually not sure when I’m asleep or awake… Because… It's just- this never-ending stream of thoughts… (pause)… I just feel such a… Weight on my chest… It's this… absence… This want I feel (deep sigh).

The barren nature of Gustav's conditions created a suffocating existential vacuum, and a feeling of losing control of his mind. Isolation entailed moral as well as ‘social death’ (Guenther, 2013), the impact of which was physical as well as psychological. Gustav visibly embodied this deterioration, and seeing him walk into the interview was in many ways shocking. His posture was defeated, his eyes were wet and blood-shot, and he had stopped showering. He had spilled food on himself without seemingly having noticed, and cried from the moment he introduced himself with his name. We talked at length about whether he was in a fit state to be interviewed, but he insisted on sharing his story. ⁴ His moral self doubt – ‘I’ve been convicted of being a monster, but I’m really not, I’m not, right?’ – was exacerbated by and meshed with sleeplessness, an inability to concentrate, and unstoppable crying. The men like Gustav who were most affected by isolation used metaphors of torture or destruction, some even describing a sense of living-death, in which they imagined themselves dissolving, rotting from within, decaying, or slowly drowning (see Crewe et al., 2020); inhabiting this almost purgatorial space:

Gustav: I just sit here all alone. For so long. I just sit here with my thoughts. I just sit here drowning in myself…

Gustav's use of metaphor captures the complex ways in which the men related to themselves. As earlier quotes from Anton, Sebastian and Oliver also suggested, the self was true and essential, something to be preserved, accessed and contained. Yet, in isolation, there was nothing other than the self, and being constantly confronted with it – left to their own subjection – could transform it into something highly oppressive.

This could result from both existential and physical claustrophobia. For Elias, for example, the lack of physical space, and his ‘unspent energy’, produced a feeling of ‘the walls moving in’ and his insides ‘boiling’, as he walked in circles to move as much as possible. Elias increasingly found himself sitting, staring into the air, and picking and scratching his skin, not noticing until it bled from his face or arms. One prisoner described his need to make cuts into his arms and legs, whilst another showed the thick scarring to his knuckles from having repeatedly pounded his fists against the concrete walls of his cell. Several prisoners described a compulsion to self-harm, linked to their contemplation about the value of life, some having already prepared suicide notes to their family. As previous research has shown, such reactions – both self-harm and suicide attempts – are linked with solitary confinement generally (see e.g., Favril et al., 2020). Simultaneously, self-harm can be a way of reminding people that they are alive (Laws, 2022; see also, Crewe et al., 2014). The crushing force of the self thereby pushed them closer to the edge of sanity:

August: I think about breaking down. You know, getting entirely completely lost in yourself. Regressing… With everything, I’m just trying to keep it together.

The boundless void of isolation made the self something in which one could drown or become lost. Prisoners could experience themselves as almost entirely powerless, and express profound disorientation about who they were, yet could also feel their self to wield great power over them. This feeling was not instant. Rather, it was stretched in time, leaving prisoners with a concern that the harm it produced might become even worse.

The free fall of voluntary isolation

We noted above that several prisoners used metaphors of death to characterise the experience of isolation. It was instructive that these metaphors were not of a swift or immediate form of death, providing release from the pains of existence. Rather, the death of isolation was horrifyingly drawn-out, described as ‘creeping’ or ‘sneaking’ up on you, as ‘darkness closing in on me’, or, to use a more concrete example, being trapped in a burning building, with no exit. Here, then, not only was death a lingering affair, but one could sense it was coming and yet be unable to evade it. Moreover, it was one's own self that threatened to extinguish life.

In such respects, the pains of voluntary isolation exceed common accounts of isolation as social death or as a cause of loneliness, loss of cognitive function or sensory deprivation – though all were present within the interview narratives. Alongside the severance of contact with others, and forms of physical decline and skin-hunger, it produced a state of free fall in relation to the self, emphasising the sense of a continuous descent over time. Sebastian compared this feeling of a fleeting self with being physically unwell:

Sebastian: It feels like… Like- you know the feeling of having been ill for weeks. And you’re just lying at home, but then you have to go to work- I remember that myself. And then when you go to work, you sort of return feeling as a stranger… to everyone else, but also to yourself… That's the sort of thing that has happened to you, that is… Your world, it becomes smaller and smaller, your language, it becomes more and more limited, your level of tolerance, it becomes lower and lower and lower.

With this, Sebastian conveys both the experience of becoming unrecognisable to himself – ‘feeling as a stranger’ – and being ‘consumed’ (Hayes, 2023) – ‘becoming smaller and smaller’. Increasingly, his ability to retain his selfhood, his sense of the world, his use of language and his ability to tolerate his circumstances, was eroded.

These feelings not only permeated the present, but seeped into prisoners’ projections of the future, including the fear that they might not be able to recover their social selfhood. Malthe, who had been voluntarily isolated for more than two years, expressed unease even at being addressed by other people:

Malthe: We’re not allowed to do anything. We sit in nothingness…

Interviewer: Do you talk to anyone here?

Malthe: No… Because it's hard. I struggle to, I think… I know […] I feel weird when people talk to me (sigh). If they ask me anything, yeah… yeah (sigh)… I’m just afraid that all this will make it difficult for me to manage ever becoming a part of society… I just sit here to be destroyed.

Because of threats to his life, Malthe saw no alternatives to isolation and he feared that years more of solitude would ‘make things even worse’. Little by little, prisoners feel unable to protect themselves or sides of themselves from its destruction, even if these aspects of their selves are precious to who they understand themselves to be or post-release who they are able to become. With voluntary isolation being entirely unregulated and in theory indefinite, it generated this sense of potentially endless descent, moving further from society, from loved ones, from desirable characteristics, and from one's entire sense of self.

Discussion

The findings presented above identify an aspect of the depth of imprisonment that extends beyond conventional descriptions, and suggests a particularly damaging and egregious version of prison isolation: a gradual feeling of becoming a lesser, more diluted version of self – the self becoming inaccessible, fractured or a source of oppression. This dimension of depth brings into relief the internal ways in which penal power functions in places of extreme confinement, and its potential to make people lose sight of who they are or who they want to be. In doing so, it incorporates into its conception an idea of self-alienation that has so far not occupied this scholarship. This includes a critical attention to the social conditions that disturb or prevent people from having themselves at their own command and the ability to relate to themselves and their place in the world in a meaningful way (see Jaeggi, 2014).

Empirically, then, this analysis advances the understanding of the impact of extreme depth, highlighting the acute ways in which solitary confinement can disrupt or destroy prisoners’ deepest sense of selfhood, even when – perhaps especially when – it is felt to be chosen. The point here is not just that, in the circumstances we have detailed, prisoners have done nothing to deserve such extreme conditions, in that they are mainly there as victims rather than perpetrators; it is that the circumstances of their imprisonment seem to push them into decisions in which they appear to have chosen their own self-destruction.

To readers of the Nordic Exceptionalism literature (see Pratt, 2008; Pratt and Eriksson, 2013), the presence of immense pain in a jurisdiction typically regarded as relatively liberal-humanitarian may be surprising. Of specific interest here is that, in contrast with the image of Nordic welfarist societies as smothering and interventionist (see e.g., Smith and Ugelvik, 2017), voluntary isolation has the capacity to be a particularly injurious mode of imprisonment namely because of the inaction of the State and its emphasis on prisoners’ individual rights. As several scholars of Nordic penal philosophies have already illustrated, there may be great differences between policy and practice (Reiter et al., 2018), and voluntary isolation vividly illuminates some of the challenges, limits and paradoxes of ostensibly humane discourses of imprisonment (Taxhjelm, 2025).

Theoretically, the core contribution of the analysis is to advance the concept of depth by relating it to the extent to which particular kinds of conditions produce a sense of distance not just from the wider community or sense of normalcy, but also from the prisoner's sense of self. In using a terminology of nothingness, disorientation and boundless descent, participants in this study highlighted the distinctive feeling of being spatially untethered, of facing a form of suffering that was potentially limitless, precisely because it had no concrete point of termination. With this, they direct us to think of depth as related not only to a surface, but also to a form of floor; the experience of solid ground and the sense of when the punishment or its impacts will cease. Whereas surface relates to the relative distance between the current state of imprisonment and an outset position – communicating a sense of the prisoner looking up – the floor represents the sense of whether that bottom has been reached or whether one is still falling – on solid ground or in thin air.

Existing scholarship has used sentence length to represent distance from freedom. But the concept of a floor pushes us to consider how other aspects of temporality and certainty might be relevant to the sense of an ending that determines key aspects of the prisoner experience. These include the uncertainty of particular carceral conditions, as well as of the sentence itself (Crewe, 2011; Warr, 2016). In this study, for example, the floor combines this experience of indeterminacy with the solitude of being left to one's own subjection, within a legal and regulatory vacuum. Specifically, voluntary isolation fuses the loss of self associated with being in solitary with the disorientation caused by not being able to predict the future. The prisoners most affected by their conditions, who describe it for example as a form of drowning slowly, are unable to reach the solid ground of knowing when they will emerge from isolation and in what state. They describe being left entirely to themselves, no longer able to depend on the potential solidity of prison staff, the system, or the law. At the same time, the disintegration of selfhood engendered by solitary confinement compounds the normal pains of indeterminate or life sentences (see, e.g., Crewe et al., 2020, 2023), since it means that even the self loses its power as a source of stability or a reliable guardrail. The anxieties of voluntary isolation relate not only to ‘the world to which they will return’ (Crewe, 2021: 338), but also whether their basic selfhood can survive the destructive impact of the conditions of their prolonged isolation.

The concept of floor hereby underscores the importance of temporal certainty, and the psychological relief that comes from knowing that there is an end to suffering. In the context of depth, it encapsulates the boundaries and temporal anchors that define prisoners’ capacity to withstand the physical, psychological and emotional challenges posed by their confinement.

As the only form of isolation in the Danish Prison Service, voluntary isolation lacks clear legal safeguards to reduce its harm and minimise its length. Such regulation would provide a kind of legal-institutional floor that might reduce the sense of being in free fall. Accordingly, our findings suggest multiple practical implications, not least that those who voluntarily isolate are not necessarily dangerous to each other and could surely be granted opportunities to mix in ways that would alleviate some of the acute difficulties we have documented. Furthermore, there is clearly more that the prison system could do to manage the situation of vulnerable prisoners more productively, without leaning on a discourse of individual rights that delegates the protective responsibilities of the state to individuals who are being victimised while legally under its care.

In unfolding this aspect of imprisonment, future research should delve deeper into the complex impact of solitary confinement on the subjective sense of self. Analytically, there is more to be said about how factors such as length of isolation, age and the number of previous sentences may shape the harms of self-isolation, for example, in association with factors such as personal resilience, the stability of identity and the cumulative impact of mortification. As described by Oliver, although voluntary isolation was elected and entailed fewer formal restrictions than disciplinary isolation, there was much to prefer about the predictable, proportional nature of punitive solitary confinement. His inability to translate the meaningfulness of his conditions, experiencing them as entirely inhumane, only exacerbated the painfulness of his boundless free fall.