Natalia Galicza of Deseret Magazine unveils the horrors of solitary confinement

In a 2024 piece for Deseret Magazine, writer Natalia Galicza brought to life all of the complexities and horrors of solitary confinement through the story of one man: Frank De Palma, who spent more than 22 years alone in a cell. “Darkness became like a blanket of protection to me,” Frank has said about those decades of isolation. “There’s something in me that’s different.”

Natalia spoke with SLR podcast host and fellow journalist Amanda Ulrich about her reporting on solitary confinement, the future of longform journalism, and her surprise at being selected as a finalist for a National Magazine Award (the winners of which will be announced on Thursday, April 10.)

The following highlights, taken from that conversation, have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity. 

Listen to the full podcast episode on Spotify or Apple podcasts. 

Amanda Ulrich: Today we’re talking about one story in particular from last year, where you wrote about one man who was in solitary confinement for more than two decades. Can you describe how you initially found Frank?

Natalia Galicza: So the genesis of how this story came to be started when the US surgeon general had released that report on a new epidemic of loneliness back in 2023. And that got me, and I feel like the rest of the country, really curious in terms of what loneliness actually does to a person.

Because for the first time, we were able to understand in a very physical and tangible way that something as seemingly benign as being isolated or out of touch with other humans can affect us in really physical ways. And I was reading through that report when it had initially come out, and there’s a national framework that addresses how we can circumvent some of the loneliness that has seeped into our lives, especially since the pandemic. And what I noticed is that there wasn’t really any mention of what that looks like in a correctional setting. I wasn’t entirely intimate or extremely familiar with what it was like to endure solitary confinement prior to writing this piece, but it’s something that I had known existed. And in my mind, it was kind of the most extreme example of loneliness and isolation that we have in our society.

So that got me curious in terms of how I could illustrate what we now know about loneliness, through the perspective of somebody who endures it to the utmost extreme: Somebody who is held in solitary confinement in a prison and really has no recourse for kind of dealing with, grappling with, and treating that loneliness. 

I knew I wanted to tell a really human-centered and tight narrative in order to best do that. And I had been looking for a character to tell this story through in reading a lot of first-person accounts about solitary confinement. I leaned a lot on this watchdog advocacy organization called Solitary Watch, because on their website they do this super cool thing of publishing a lot of first-person essays written by people who are in solitary confinement or have been in solitary confinement. And that’s actually how I stumbled across Frank. He had written an essay that was published on this website and I thought it was incredibly haunting. He detailed some of his experience and some of the effects of that experience really beautifully. And I knew I wanted to reach out to him and learn more about that and see if he would be willing to let me profile him for this piece.

You write that in the beginning, in those brief moments where he is allowed to leave his very small cell, [Frank] starts to feel like he’s having a panic attack and has a sense of agoraphobia, and he actually begins to isolate himself more because the cell feels like the only safe place. Do you think at the time he knew that these were panic attacks, or kind of knew what was happening?

Frank had not experienced, prior to his initial panic attack while out in the rec yard, a panic attack before. Or at least he hadn’t remembered experiencing one to that same degree. So he didn’t really know what it was at first. And, you know, it can be very frightening for anybody to experience one for the first time. It feels more like an external thing than an internal thing, right? Like the walls are closing in on you.

So he retreated into his cell, because he noticed that those feelings of panic and being closed in on, those feelings of almost claustrophobia, happened because he was outside of his cell. And I think it took him a while to actually realize exactly what that meant. But through trial and error, he realized that any time he would go out into the rec yard or go out into the showers to take a shower, he would start to feel that same constricting feeling again.

And so through enough experiences, enough go-arounds of encountering that feeling of panic, he realized that it was directly associated with leaving his cell. And so he stopped leaving his cell. He made that decision to not go out for exercise in the rec yard and would instead take little “bird baths,” as he called it, in his cell through the sink that he had there, rather than go out into the showers and take a shower. Because that would mean having to leave and enter a more spacious environment that had begun to feel all too much for him. So I really don’t think he initially knew what they were in terms of the panic attacks, but he quickly learned that they were directly associated with any time spent outside of his cell. And so he decided to isolate even more.

You also write that at one point Frank got the chance to look in the mirror for the first time in years. And you say that there were many points during the solitary confinement where Frank wondered if he even existed at all. How did he say he was able to get to the other side of thoughts like that, when he’s sitting there in the cell and everything starts to break down in that way? How do you continue on?

I mean that’s the question, really. In Frank’s case, too, he had really retreated outside of himself at any chance he could get. And I feel like that was maybe a way of coping, but also just an involuntary response to feeling as detached from reality and dissociated as he was during that time. 

Some examples of that: If he had any exposure to any living thing, like if a bug had entered his cell, he would really focus in on that and just spend as much time touching it, talking to it, interacting with it, as he possibly could, as a means of kind of escaping outside of his own head. But when that wasn’t around, or when people weren’t around, he had developed a relationship with a prison chaplain who, every so often, would visit people held in solitary and have moments of spiritual guidance and conversation.

But when he didn’t have that or any other access to any living thing, which was the vast majority of the time, he would retreat inside of himself. He would have daydreams about social interactions, about meeting somebody in a grocery store and having a conversation in the produce section. He would have flashbacks to his own childhood. He would relive memories, because they were really the closest thing he had in terms of being around people and what it felt like to be around people. So I think those were his coping mechanisms in terms of how he would keep himself going through that time period.

But for lack of a better word, I know it’s disheartening to say, but the reality of it, too, is that he had given up. When it was time for him to be taken out of his cell and moved to another facility, where he would prepare to be reintroduced to society with his impending release coming up from prison, he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to. He was perfectly content with staying in that environment, because it had defeated him in a sense. But luckily there were people in his corner upon his transition to the other facility who helped him, step by step, get comfortable around people again. Who helped him practice eating around people in the mess hall, and take rounds around the facility in order to see other people from a distance before he felt comfortable being more up close with them and interacting with them.

In that particular environment, in the next facility that he had transitioned to which was a lower-security prison, the cells usually had several people to a room. But he was able to be in his own cell, because of his requests, and practice very slowly being around other people before he could fully reintegrate and exist in a cell where he would be bunking with other incarcerated people.

So even though it had really defeated him and chipped away at who he was — that experience of isolation — he was fortunate enough that there were people who vouched for him and helped him, very slowly, adapt and reintroduce and find himself again. Which I think was imperative in terms of his ability to exist out in the world as he does today, and have neighbors and have a sense of community, despite feeling so incredibly alone for a quarter of his life. 

Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photo courtesy of Ken Lund/Creative Commons via Flickr.