From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, 1843

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."

Charles Dickens was perhaps an even more prolific journalist than writer of fiction, and wrote with a vigor, passion, erudition, and command of language in his journalism that is unlike anything in our time—blogs and tweets notwithstanding,

He also wrote at a time when a great city and culture was undergoing significant and traumatic change. The industrial revolution was remaking the world. Dickens wrote looking at the same world as Marx, Malthus, Tolstoy—not to mention, in America, Emerson and Twain. The question: How do we live? How can we be fair and just to those overwhelmed by the social revolution underway? How do we build institutions that are on a scale and have a purpose where human beings matter? These are questions we confront today in the early 21st century.

For Dickens, the prison was an important institution that was a touchstone of this new world being created and its capacity for humanity. On his visit to America in 1842, Dickens reported on the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. America had created a new kind of prison with the penitentiary and Europeans like Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to see how this ostensibly more humane form of punishment worked. Maryland opened its penitentiary on Forrest Street in Baltimore with this new model in 1811.

In American Notes, Dickens made these observations about what we Americans had created:

In the outskirts stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary: conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of Pennsylvania. The system here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself whether, if I had the power of saying "Yes" or "No," I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lay me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.

While American penology has evolved since the invention of the penitentiary, regular use of solitary confinement, particularly in its so-called super-maximum prisons—like Maryland's North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland—is commonplace. National Geographic profiled North Branch in 2007, calling it one of the "most technologically advanced maximum-security prisons in America." Dickens would have wanted to report on such a institution.

But the use of solitary confinement extends well beyond the supermax. At the Metropolitan Transition Center—housed in the former penitentiary on Forrest Street in Baltimore—where I taught, I once met a nineteen-year-old who had spent more than two-hundred days in solitary confinement in C-Block, or the administrative segregation unit of the prison. He was a Baltimore boy.

Here is a timeline of the history of the use of solitary confinement in America, and here is a piece from the National Radio Project with powerful testimony about solitary confinement that Dickens would have recognized.

Of course, later in Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the Children of Man, "Ignorance" and "Want." And when Scrooge, with his moral conscience aroused, asks if any provision has been made for these children, the Ghost of Christmas Present mocks him:

"Are there no prisons?"

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