There is always a box

Last week, images of metal cages for single prisoners at the Everglades concentration camp known as Alligator Alcatraz made the rounds. They’d been part of a report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, alleging several problems at the facility that had first been stood up in July 2025, before being decommissioned in June.

The report said that authorities claimed metal cages were used in January 2025 for a total of 79 people, with none of them held for more than two hours. These details are clearly not the whole story. But the report’s findings are nonetheless striking, because use of “the box” had been reported since the opening weeks of the camp in the summer of 2025.

At that time, NPR played audio of a 21-year old Nicaraguan detainee who, more than a year ago, described his experience in “the box”—how he was chained to the ground in a cage in the hot sun. When one of the other detainees complained about it, they were subjected to the same treatment.

The report didn’t unearth that kind of abuse, and didn’t claim to have confirmed administrators’ statements that no one was held in the cages for more than two hours. But there are multiple accounts, from Amnesty International and elsewhere, that “the box” was not a glorified time-out room, but a site of torture and abuse.

Nevertheless, the IG’s report introduced into the official record a number of serious problems. And online and on television, it was the image of those cages that made the biggest impression, along with the report’s acknowledgment that their use posed “significant risks to detainee health and safety.”

Today I want to write about the uses of solitary confinement, why every lawless system comes to it, why it’s always abused, and how it fits into the world of concentration camps and prisons alike.

First, I’ve called the Everglades Camp a concentration camp since its beginning, because it fits the bill of mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of identity for the political benefit of a leader or party. And it’s a particular kind of camp—one we’ve seen in a number of places before. It especially mirrors the ad-hoc and wild abuses of early starter camps that helped set the stage for much larger entrenched systems in the past.

Several years before the official creation of the Soviet Gulag, the camp at Solovki entered the world as a site of horrors. The complex sat on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, off the coast of northwestern Russia.

Before the U.S.S.R. was established, the site had been an isolated monastery for nearly five hundred years. With the Church’s authority very much backing monarchical rule during the Bolshevik Revolution, priests and churches became political targets in the Soviet state. After early escapes by detainees held in concentration camps built on the mainland, Solovki was seized, its buildings converted to a giant camp complex.

This was still in the early stages of the U.S.S.R., so all kinds of tortures were carried over from the Tsarist era. But others were improvised on the spot. Some of the worst treatment took place in solitary confinement—in what were called the penal isolators—of the Ascension Church on Mount Serkinaya.

As the Gulag took root later that decade, more formal, purpose-built camps came into existence, with sheds and buildings constructed specifically for isolation. Some isolation cells might keep two or three people sequestered from the rest of the camp, with prisoners given severely reduced rations of water and less than eight ounces of bread a day. But odinochki, the smaller cells built to punish a single individual, played a more traumatic role.

In early Nazi camps, similar isolation spaces for hazing and torture were likewise improvised. At the Kemna concentration camp, detainees were stuffed into metal lockers, which guards blew smoke into or flipped over, inventing new tactics as they went.

Later, in Vietnam, five-foot metal shipping containers in the hot sun would be used as “the box.” Every camp system riffed on when and how to use severely constricted solitary confinement. As a practice, it was as common as dirt.

Solitary confinement abroad and at home

And while solitary confinement in a concentration camp is one of the most dehumanizing and hopeless places on the planet, it isn’t necessary to even look at concentration camps to see the effects of this kind of treatment.

More than a decade ago the U.N. special rapporteur for torture Juan E. Méndez said that solitary confinement, as it is used around the globe, amounts to torture in most cases, with lasting mental damage caused after just a few days of social isolation.

And U.S. prisons today, and every day, tens of thousands of people remain in solitary confinement, including juvenile offenders. Since Congressional action in 2018, the country has gotten to a point where twenty-nine states have barred punitive solitary confinement for juveniles. But its use continues in many others. As you might guess, people of color are disproportionately represented among those languishing in solitary—as are trans folks and the mentally ill.

Historical confinement in the U.S.

The use of both solitary confinement and what has long been known as “the box” is far from a new phenomenon. In the wake of the Civil War, a contract labor system in the U.S. rose up in states like Georgia to replace slave labor with incarcerated workers. And just as slavery had done, the new system made use of “the sweat box” for punishment, along with physical assaults and other kinds of abuse.

It was a common apparatus, even in Florida, the state home of Alligator Alcatraz. A TIME magazine story from the 1930s noted the death of one inmate subjected to the box. What follows is the lede from that story.

“On the afternoon of June 3, Arthur Maillefert, 22. of Westfield. N. J., serving nine years for stealing $30. was found strangled to death in the "sweatbox" of Duval County's Sunbeam prison camp. A sweatbox is a windowless outdoor solitary confinement cell little bigger than a coffin. According to Florida law it should be 3 ft. broad. There should be ventilation. Arthur Maillefert. called "Jersey" by his prison mates, had passed the previous evening in the sweatbox naked and inside a barrel out of which he tried to gnaw.”

The evolution of concentration camps

Even this brief survey makes clear that the existence of a concentration camp isn’t required in order for the cruel use of solitary confinement and devices like the box. But as an institution, concentration camps are inherently more dangerous over time, because camps are an end run around the existing system of detention. That end run is made because there’s some harm the governing party or leader wants to inflict that the existing system won’t let them turn to.

And each big system that gets created brings something new with it. The U.S. is in the process of building one of the largest camp systems in history. What is Trump 2.0 adding? Think of it as a kind of parallel to Putin seizing Crimea from Ukraine, which was largely done in the open, while Moscow denied it was happening.

But with Trump 2.0, he ran on the idea of activating hate against vulnerable groups and promising people he would remove millions of human beings from society. Trump and Stephen Miller ran on creating massive camps.

The concentration-camp settings created during George W. Bush’s War on Terror were predominantly black sites, and the government tried to keep them secret. Since returning to office Trump, has done the opposite.

He’s made dozens of agreements to deport immigrants into other countries that appear happy to detain them indefinitely under horrific conditions in exchange for whatever corrupt bill of goods those governments have been promised. But I’m delighted to report that late last week, a judge blocked Trump’s third-country programs, saying they did not meet the requirements for due process.

The reason for the box

Given that over the last year, detainees at the Everglades Camp have reported at least two sizes of “the box”—the 4’ X 4’ cages and the 2’ X 2’ ones—it’s entirely possible the site had isolation cells in various sizes. Only a full investigation will be able to determine the number and kinds of spaces used as punishment isolators.

Ostensibly, the reason for the existence of solitary confinement and spaces like “the box” is for those who are a danger to guards or to other prisoners or detainees, or even themselves. But in camps, there’s a tremendous gap between the rationale for these spaces and their actual use.

While the administration embraces Nazi race language and visuals, as well as authoritarian memes from the around the world, I don’t think more than one or two Trump gang members have actually read any concentration camp history. It’s true that Trump supporters sometimes wear t-shirts celebrating the disappearances and murders under Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, when bodies were thrown from helicopters. But ICE officers aren’t staying up late at night studying those tactics today. They don’t need to. A newer category of the “disappeared” has taken shape.

The twenty-first century “disappeared”

On one hand, one newer kind of disappearance we’ve heard about this week happens when ICE removes the names and whereabouts of detainees who have final deportation orders from their tracker system, making it much more difficult to find out where and under what conditions people are being held. And on the foreign side of disappearances, we’ve seen even more innovation. The Office of Remigration, established in the second Trump presidency, has been disappearing people to third countries where they’re held in prisons indefinitely. In other cases, detainees have even been sent back to homelands in which they face a high risk of death.

Still, in the U.S., the box has a longer history than these kinds of disappearances, having arisen again and again in countless settings. The wish to imprison people who are seen as threats and to remove people from society has led to prisons in which the law is not applied evenly, or kept at all.

I’ve mentioned before that if you bake with the same ingredients, you’re going to wind up with a similar kind of cake. And in this case, the administration is reinventing the arc of concentration camps, even as it repeats the history of U.S. prisons. But now, they’re starting from even more heinous first principles, with even less oversight.

Let me repeat that the rationale for a thing’s existence does not necessarily correspond to how it is actually used or applied. The justification for the box was to keep law and order, but in reality it came into being as a way to further punish those who had been subjected to some of the worst conditions on Earth.

I want to address the larger issue here. The reason that there’s always a box is because when the prime goal is punishment, the long-term detention of people is always going to create a space for the next worse thing.

It’s partly a process of normalization, as many have noted about our current nightmare. But it’s also true that prisons with heinous conditions will never be enough for those who want more power than they can get in the existing system. Which leads to a penal system in which lawless conditions are allowed to flourish. Which leads to a concentration camp—sites meant to avoid the constraints of laws and due process entirely.

But even that isn’t enough, because the existence of the targeted group can be further exploited by those in power. Even a concentration camp needs a next-worse place to send people, in order to punish them more severely.

Solitary confinement and the box are an attempt to remove even the possibility of community solidarity from those targeted groups in camps. The use of the box in a concentration camp becomes an abyss within an abyss. And left unchecked, we know that historically, these abysses open the door to physical annihilation at scale. Because corrupt power will find a way to exact a higher cost if it can reap benefits from the greater suffering of more people.

What is to be done?

I’ve written before that when I taught self-defense to children in pre-kindergarten, part of what I taught them was to learn to spot when someone is trying to trick them. An important lesson for adults to learn—which we can help others learn—is that “the box” is always a trick. Whatever the rationale given for doing it, targeting whole groups for removal from society or for suffering, even in small ways, opens a door. And without being permanently closed, that doorway leads to the next abuse, and the next.

What the Trump administration is doing is trying to drive every strategy in every arena of existence toward “the box”—the most isolating and vulnerable, the most physically and psychologically punishing conditions. They’re consigning Medicaid recipients to horrific treatment and lack of resources that will harm millions. They’re killing hundreds of thousands of women and children around the world simply for being dependent on U.S. aid. They’re destroying universities. They’re trying to drive trans people out of society. They are ethnically purging the country as a whole, for personal profit.

It’s critical to step outside the scaremongering and the rhetoric of hate to explain what’s really happening. Despite having more power than anyone on the planet, Trump wants more. He wants to exploit the powerless and scare people into giving him more control.

What can we do? Take back power locally, set standards within your community, call out the harms being done directly there to everyone—to immigrants, to government workers, to veterans, to schoolchildren and the elderly. Whatever your cause, there’s plenty of room to work.

There is always a box, and our job is twofold. First, we don’t let anyone get put inside the box. And second, we destroy the box.

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