Julie Kelly has written about the detention of those present in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The U.S. Department of Justice has kept all arrestees — even those charged with no violent crimes — in solitary confinement in a squalid D.C. jail for 23 hours a day for many months. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote how Joseph Stalin treated political prisoners in the same way:
The loneliness of the accused! That was one more factor in the success of unjust interrogation! The entire apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and inhibited will. From the moment of his arrest and throughout the entire shock period of the interrogation the prisoner was, ideally, to be kept entirely alone. In his cell, in the corridor, on the stairs, in the offices, he was not supposed to encounter others like himself [sic], in order to avoid the risk of his gleaning a bit of sympathy, advice, support from someone’s smile or glance. The Organs did everything to blot out for him his future and distort his present: to lead him to believe that his friends and family had all been arrested and that material proof of his guilt had been found.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, p 123