Don’t tell me, I know it has been much more than a year. I think of this dismal, dispiriting period as a dark era when nothing seemed to go right and every good augur soon went south. Many of us who like to travel travelled only to the bathroom, and some of us who enjoy meeting other people had to be content with sipping tequila and speaking to a face on the computer screen. Essentially, it has been a period of confinement.

The word was used commonly once for women kept in hospitals for two weeks after childbirth for their bodies to recover. In Asian countries, a woman stayed in bed with her baby for as long as thirty to ninety days because infant mortality was high. During the Second World War, hard pressed for wounded soldiers, hospitals slashed the period of ‘lying-in’ to one week; now it has come down to two days. For men, the word confinement means something different, something horrendously different. Something so atrocious that it astounds me that we go to sleep every night peacefully while our societies practice this horror on our fellow beings.

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there are no clear statistics, but it seems many countries are extending this horror for specious reasons and even concealing the practice from the public eye. Solitary confinement of people in prisons, placing them in a small, bare, sealed room, isolated from the outside world, is becoming commoner. The practice began with the excuse that confinement might help a prisoner who acted uncontrolled or violent.

The isolation from his usual environment – his cell, his prison work, other prisoners – would help calm him down. If that was really the idea, a therapeutic one, the person would be confined for a short period and restored to normal surroundings in a few hours. He would again be with other persons, eat meals with them and do his usual chores.

But the motivation for confinement is seldom therapeutic, intended to help the person. It is almost invariably punitive. If a detained person has acted in any way that displeases someone in authority, the warden, a supervisor or any guard, that becomes a pretext for punishing the person by confining him. It may be some overt conduct, a minor dispute with another prisoner or a conflict over a food item, or a perceived or imagined slight to any official, or even the briefest exchange with another detainee who is regarded as a troublemaker. it becomes a valid reason to bury a person in what is commonly called ‘the hole.’

There were very good reasons for the original idea of making solitary confinement both a rare and a brief affair. Every study has shown that it is profoundly damaging for any person, let alone a person who is already deprived of the freedom to move around or mix with friends and family members, to be robbed of contact with familiar surroundings.

To keep a person deprived of any connection with friends and coworkers or any supportive activities like working, reading or conversing with associates, is grievously destructive.

Its destructive potential is even greater if the person confined is relatively young or has mental health issues. Though it is difficult to prove this, because these ill effects are known to the authorities, they sometimes deliberately inflict such punishment on especially vulnerable people to hurt them. When such victims, psychologically crippled, are eventually released in society without any corrective treatment, terrible things wait to happen. This brutal and inhuman system draws its sustenance from two different sources. The first is money.

The US, which has the shameful record of incarcerating about 6 million people, including those on probation or parole – 10 million enter the prison system each year – is steadily increasing people who are entombed in the so-called Supermax prisons, where nobody can hear their screams and where they are perennially shut in 60 square-feet high-tech steel-and-concrete dungeons.

Law-and-order politicians get funds for private companies to build these soul-destroying exclusion factories where men are crushed into pliant creatures. The other is power. In countries like India, prison authorities enjoy the unlimited authority to treat prisoners – including people who have been held for decades without even a trial – any way they like, abusing them at will and punishing them at whim.

The constitution of the country may sanctimoniously prohibit solitary confinement without a reason, and certainly for any length of time, but prison masters regularly use cruel and lengthy isolation to chasten men and women at bay.

The government looks the other way while sadistic guards and their bosses find new ways to break the spirit of people who protest or assert their independence. The fate of the thousands who suffer a fate worse than living death is a phenomenon that is easy to overlook for the rest of us who live a free life and are kept artfully ignorant of the way a section of our fellow beings are brutalized year after year.

The pandemic, whatever else it has done, has brought us a taste of what isolation from friends and family feels like. If it wakes us to a realization of the horror that is perpetrated on many like us, we may have opened the door to an understanding of the cruelties that go on daily in the name of our safety and better living.