The report that revealed that more than 122,000 prisoners in the US were in solitary confinement

A one-of-a-kind report released for the first time on Tuesday called “Calculating Torture” provided a clearer estimate of how many people may be suffering from solitary confinement in US jails and prisons in one day: 122,840.

Research by the nonprofit organization Solitary Watch and Unlock the Box, a campaign against solitary confinement, provides the most recent and complete picture of the use of solitary confinement in the United States.

But even that number, which represents just over 6% of the country's prison population, is probably a significant underestimate.

And it is that the data of the investigation was based on the information offered by state and local prisons, as well as state and federal prisons, and that according to the investigation, had not been previously combined and many are self-supplied by the sources themselves.

In addition, it does not include immigrants in detention centers, where “people are locked up in isolation almost 9,000 times a year,” nor data from centers for minors, nor other informal or transitory forms of solitary confinement.

Still, the report looked at data on solitary confinement for 22 hours or more on any given day in 2019 and showed that there were 2.03 million people in the country's prisons that year, noting that solitary confinement is a punishment that is disproportionately imposed on African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other minorities, and that it remains a common and widespread practice.

Florida was the state with the most solitary inmates at the time analyzed, nearly 11,000 with a prison population of about 85,000, followed by Texas, with some 5,500 inmates among its nearly 137,000 inmates, the largest prison population in the country in 2019.

“The widespread use of solitary confinement is a humanitarian crisis. As the United Nations has confirmed, it is torture taking place on American soil” and yet “we have not even had a full count of how many people are in isolation,” Jean Casella, director of Solitary Watch, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Jessica Sandoval, director of the Unlock the Box campaign, recalled that there is evidence showing that solitary confinement causes lasting psychological, neurological and physical damage, dramatically increases suicide rates and fails to reduce prison violence.

A recent report from the New York Correctional Association revealed that state prisons continue to impose prolonged solitary confinement on their population.