"With a toilet, sink, shelf and beds, the men were left with a sliver of space about a foot-and-a-half wide to maneuver around each other. If one stood, the other had to sit. They could palm both walls without fully extending their arms. There was no natural light, just a fluorescent bulb and small Plexiglas windows that looked out onto the hall. The solid door muffled the cacophony of shouting and door-banging ricocheting off the tier. It also blocked ventilation.
The space itself appeared to be decomposing. The front wall, next to the door, was made of corroded metal. The paint on the wedge-shaped shelf had almost completely chipped away; the beds were caked in rust; and the floor underneath the toilet was stained brown and black. Dust and crumbs accumulated in every corner.
When guards locked the door, Sesson didn't know anything about Simmons — not his name, not what he had done to wind up in prison or what he did to end up in solitary. But Sesson says Simmons had heard a few things about him. He knew he was a "bug," someone who attacks his cellmates. And while Simmons was three inches taller, at 5 feet 7 inches, Sesson outweighed him by more than 100 pounds.
The two started arguing immediately. Each had to prove that he would not be messed with, because if something happened — if one attacked the other — there was no escape. The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din."...
While there are no national statistics on the number of people confined in double-cell "solitary," at least 18 state prison systems double-up a portion of their restrictive housing, and over 80 percent of the 10,747 federal prisoners in solitary have a cellmate...
Inmates in the segregation unit receive two showers and nine hours of recreation time each week, according to prison officials (inmates, lawyers and advocates claim it is often far less). Check-ins with medical and mental-health staff often take place through the cell door, forcing prisoners to report intimate physical and psychological problems in front of their cellmates, or not at all.
Across the country, double-celled inmates have lashed out against crowded conditions in extreme ways.
One prisoner, Aaron Fillmore, started feeling an unexplainable aggression toward his cellmate. "It was a level of discomfort that I never experienced before," he wrote in a letter. Fillmore was double-celled at Lawrence Correctional Center in Illinois for three months. "I had thoughts of just punching him in the face. Why? I have no idea. I just had the urge to do it.""
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