In solitary confinement, an inmate hangs on for his life to come

It's Christmas Eve in the hole, and Keegan Rolenc hears familiar moans and cries for help from down the cell block. He figures it's because starting tomorrow the unit will go on lockdown for three days. No calls, no mail, no exercise time. Worse yet: The guards close both doors to the cells, so inmates in solitary confinement hear nothing but their own thoughts.

Rolenc has been in solitary for a month now, with 11 more to go. Already, his mind is playing tricks on him. He hardly sleeps, and when he does he has nightmares that he gets out of prison and the cops bust him with a pistol. He runs away but they always catch him.

He promises himself that won't happen. Tomorrow will be the third Christmas in a row he's missed with his son, and that's enough.

When I step foot out of these gates I never want to see the inside of a jail or prison another day in my life, he writes in his journal. I know it's all on me. I gotta make that a reality.

In November 2015, the Minnesota Department of Corrections sentenced Rolenc, a 23-year-old Minneapolis man, to a year in solitary confinement for assaulting his son's mother during a visit. He will serve most of that sentence in a cell the size of a small child's bedroom. He will be alone for 23, sometimes 24 hours a day. Over the course of a year, he will be permitted one visit, from his mother and his 5-year-old son.

Rolenc's was one of the 7,500 solitary sentences handed to Minnesota prisoners last year alone; he is among an estimated 100,000 serving time in isolation around the country. His punishment comes when many states are reconsidering the practice of isolating prisoners. At least 30 have passed new laws or policies limiting how prisons can use solitary confinement to punish inmates. Minnesota, where more than 400 prisoners have spent at least a year in solitary during the last decade, is not among them.

The Star Tribune spoke to dozens of inmates who have served lengthy solitary sentences. In letters, phone calls and supervised interviews in prison they described the torment of spending months or years alone in closed quarters, under perpetual supervision and with little or nothing to occupy their minds. Some told of the psychosis that ensued. One man said he passed the time by killing small bugs he found in his cell. Another likened his experience to a caged lion at the zoo. "He just give up on life," he wrote. "If you try to let him out in the jungle, he won't be able to survive."

The Department of Corrections denied an in-person interview with Rolenc, who was released from solitary in late November, citing potential further trauma to his victim. To tell his story, Rolenc agreed to share family letters and his handwritten journal in which he meticulously documented life in the hole. Together, they provide a rare, real-time glimpse into the mind of a person living in long-term isolation.

This isn't for the weak minded or weak hearted, Rolenc writes. Back here it's a regular occurrence for dudes to snap and sling feces all over their cell, eat feces, smear it on their body … It's the monotony, the boredom, the hopelessness, the helplessness, the anger, the frustration, the loneliness, being tired of the same thing day in and day out for days, months, years that brings them to the breaking point.

It's late November 2015, and Rolenc sits in the disciplinary unit of the Faribault prison. When he closes his eyes, he sees the horrific incident that landed him in solitary. The guilt is heavy, like waves crashing against the inside of his skull.

His son, Jamaal, and his son's mother, Shay, had come to visit here in Faribault, where Rolenc is serving four years for shooting up a car and house. Rolenc and Shay argued. Shay hit him in the head and kicked him in the shin. When Rolenc got up to end the visit, she slapped him with an open hand across the face, according to prison disciplinary documents.

I lost it, Rolenc writes. I punched her a couple times then threw her on the ground and stomped her a couple times (not in the head though) ... afterwards I couldn't believe what I had just done. In front of my son. To his mom.

Two weeks later, he is summoned to an in-house disciplinary hearing. Rolenc does not have a lawyer with him. The prison charges him with assault, aggravated assault, attempted homicide and disorderly conduct. They offer him 360 days in the hole, with 120 days added to the four years he started serving in 2012. If he tries to fight it, they could push for an even longer stay in solitary. He signs the contract but wonders if he made a mistake.

I probably should've got some type of legal advice ... but I just wanted the s*** to be over and the 'not knowing' was killing me.

He goes back to his cell and thinks about the time.

360 days. 12 months. 52 weeks.

He questions whether he will stay sane. Maybe this will make him stronger, like a mental test.

On Dec. 9, 2015, the officers come to collect Rolenc, and he sees the letters "OPH" emblazoned on a bag. He realizes they're sending him to Oak Park Heights, Minnesota's maximum security prison. They bring him directly to the Administrative Control Unit — the "ACU" — the strictest lockdown isolation unit in the state.

Ain't no telling what I'll be after being here for a year, he writes.

Forty miles from the Oak Park Heights prison, on a block of one-story bungalows in south Minneapolis, a letter arrives in Sharon Rolenc's mailbox.

It's from her son. He asks if she will teach him to cook when he gets out of prison so he can make breakfast for Jamaal. He wants to make French toast. Even weeks later, Sharon tears up at the sentiment.

Sharon, who works in communications for a Twin Cities college, always thought Keegan would be a Rhodes scholar — not a criminal. She tries to pinpoint the moment things went so wrong.

Keegan grew up in middle-class Minneapolis neighborhoods, and Sharon recalls his exceptional acumen for academics at a young age. In elementary school, he started taking classes with students in the grade ahead. He excelled at football and basketball, and he dreamed of playing in college. The future seemed full of possibilities.

Keegan's biological father wasn't much in the picture. He went to prison for selling drugs before Keegan was born, and Sharon always imagined their relationship, maintained mostly through letters and the occasional phone call, caused internal anguish with her son. There was also the matter of growing up biracial — Sharon is white, Keegan's dad is black — and Keegan often being among a minority of children of color in school.

When Keegan was 7, Sharon married Paul Coe, a white man. She tried to find a black role model for her son by enrolling him in Big Brother programs, but they were always placed at the bottom of the waiting list, she remembered.

Keegan started getting in trouble in middle school. One semester, his principal suspended him 11 times for mouthing off and arguing with teachers. Sharon realized her son was hanging out with gang members, so she moved him to different schools around the city, but trouble followed to each one. In high school he was convicted of possessing prescription pain pills. Because they lived across from a school, the prosecutor upped the charge to a felony, ruling out a career in teaching or social work, like he'd always talked about.

Keegan graduated from Washburn High School in 2010, and Sharon thought he had finally outrun his problems with the law when he moved two hours west to Willmar, Minn., to attend community college and play basketball.

But the real problems were just beginning.

Keegan was less than a year from finishing his associate degree when he called from the Hennepin County jail to say he'd been arrested in connection with a drive-by shooting.

No one was hurt, but the incident came just weeks after the high-profile death of Terrell Mayes, a 3-year-old shot by a stray bullet, and prosecutors charged Keegan with eight felonies, including drive-by shooting and second-degree assault. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman made an example out of the Rolenc to the press, identifying him as a member of the Tre Tre gang and linking the assault to the same pattern that caused the Mayes killing.

"You can't make a priority of every single one of the 10,000-plus crimes that come in here," Freeman told reporters. "But when you look at the ones that we believe — and history shows us — cause the most misery in the neighborhoods, I think it's guns. And it's gunfire that tragically killed [Terrell]."

Winter has come, and the ACU is cold. Rolenc sits under three blankets, and his nose is still running. He's so hungry he eats a sugar packet. He starts sleeping until 2 or 3 p.m., sometimes as late as 9.

Rolenc misses his son. He feels utterly alone.

He calls Shay. Her lip is badly split and she might need plastic surgery. She doesn't accept his apology. She doesn't care that he got a year in the hole. Their son has been talking about the time Daddy punched Mom.

Writing in his journal later, Rolenc can't find the words to describe how that makes him feel. He wants to tell Jamaal that what he did was wrong, and that no man should ever put his hands on a woman.

I need to find other ways besides violence and intimidation to get what I want, he writes.

Rolenc's 360 days will be broken up into phases. Phase one means he gets five books and one phone call a week. With good behavior, he'll hit phase three in March, and he will be allowed more phone calls and snacks from the commissary. Maybe even a radio.

He tries to make the best of the time. He starts reading "Waiting to Exhale" by Terry McMillan and books about travel and starting a small business. He resolves to go to back to school when he's out. Maybe he can be a lawyer or paralegal. During the weeknights, correctional officers leave the exterior cell door open, and Rolenc stays up all night playing chess with his cell neighbors by tearing pieces of paper, drawing a board and shouting out moves.

In January, his son finally comes to visit with Rolenc's mother, Sharon. He hasn't felt this good since he arrived into solitary. Jamaal tells him that whenever the phone rings he rushes to pick it up, thinking it's his dad, but it never is.

I told him I wish I could call every day but they only let me once a week, but that I think about him every day all day. Man I miss my lil dude. That's my life.

Sharon is dismayed that Keegan struck the mother of his child, and doesn't question that he should be seriously disciplined for it.

"What I question is the use of solitary," she said.

When Keegan told her about his sentence, Sharon had read articles about other states rethinking the use of solitary confinement. She was shocked that Minnesota still gave out yearlong terms, she said. She found herself overcome with fear about who would come out of that cell after 360 days of solitude.

"I worry about what solitary is going to do — to destroy that spirit," she said. "That passion in him. That fierce protectiveness. That social animal. That kind, loving, big-hearted young man. What's it going to do to him?"

Sharon started calling and e-mailing corrections officials, and state and local politicians, pleading for an amended punishment that didn't carry the potential mental health effects of solitary.

"Please do something," she wrote to Gov. Mark Dayton. "Say something. If you remain silent, how will this ever change?"

"I'm back to sleepless nights, worried to death that my son will be ignored when he needs help the most," she wrote in another. "I'm back to being terrified that I will get a call that my son has died in his cell, either due to something that was 100 percent preventable, or at his own hands because the DOC officers have done everything in their power to break him down. Please, please don't let that happen!"

"There is absolutely nothing in his record to justify a year's worth of solitary confinement," she wrote to Bruce Reiser, deputy commissioner for the Department of Corrections. She understood the department extending Keegan's prison sentence, she wrote, "but 360 days in solitary? No programming, no job, no classes? He's released from solitary a month before he's released from jail. How on earth does this prepare him to succeed after prison? How does this 'contribute to a safer Minnesota' as the DOC website's tagline says?"

Reiser assured her that he was aware of the mental health concerns of solitary, and the department would assign a therapist to keep an eye on him. But Keegan committed a serious offense, he wrote, and the department's discipline policy was clear.

"I encourage you to speak with your son in regards to what he can do to better himself while he is incarcerated," he wrote.

Rolenc wonders if there's a ghost in his cell.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a light has turned on, even though the switch is across the room. He gets up and turns it off. As soon as he falls asleep he hears a loud noise. This time an orange has fallen off his sink onto a garbage bag.

Yeah there's a ghost or something in here, he concludes. He hopes no one died in his cell.

He has stopped getting out of bed, other than for meals. He reads the same books over and again. He frequently hears men screaming down the hall. One day someone is threatening to kill himself.

He gets so frustrated he contemplates a violent episode, but he decides he needs to be more tactical.

I'm a prisoner of war behind enemy lines right now, so I need to think and act like it. They got the upper hand right now so it's cool, I'll have to play the hand I was dealt and hold my cards to my chest.

He thinks always of Jamaal. He doesn't want him to follow the same criminal path he did, but sometimes he wonders if it's too late.

One night he dreams Jamaal transforms into water, and Rolenc has to carry him in a plastic bag. He steps outside into a hurricane and the bag spills. When he gets back inside, too much of the water has gone, and it won't turn back into his son.

A couple of days later, a correctional officer tells Rolenc they're taking away his visits. Rolenc was never supposed to get them, he says. There was a mistake at the head office. This means Rolenc won't see his son until he gets out in nearly a year.

He feels his heart pounding. His head throbs and his hands shake. He wants to snap. Instead, he lies down and prays not to do something he will regret.

Over the next few days, he lies in his bed and imagines what it will be like to get out and see his son. He can't sleep and frequently wakes up in the middle of the night and lies there until breakfast.

I think I'm losing my damn mind, he writes.

Rolenc has lost 23 pounds, he writes. He feels his body is falling apart.

A neighbor advises Rolenc to eat his own feces. He says that will buy him a transfer out of ACU and into the mental health unit, where the food is better. The inmate says he's going to eat his feces every day until they transfer him.

"You got a chemical imbalance," Rolenc tells him.

"You gotta do what you gotta do," his neighbor replies.

Rolenc thinks about the outside. His life has been on pause since he came to prison in 2012 — when he was 19 — but the rest of the world has remained on play. He tries to imagine how his friends and family have changed, but he can't. He sees them only as they were four years ago.

One day he gets a letter from his father saying he's back in prison, too. He thinks again about Jamaal and the toll of growing up with family members in prison.

So I question myself if at the tender age of five my son has already been stripped of his idea of a loving, caring, carefree world?

And if that is true, he wonders, is it his fault?

March 1. Rolenc learns that the Rice County prosecutor is charging him with third-degree assault for beating up Shay. If convicted, he could spend two more years in prison — on top of the one year that he's serving in solitary, and in addition to the 120 days that were already added to his sentence.

That means two more years of missed birthdays, holidays, basketball games.

He loses his temper. He thinks the charge is unfair on top of the punishment he's already serving. He resolves that he won't take it idly.

I'll tell you one thing, I'ma wild the f*** out when I get there, he writes. That's on everything I love — even if that means spending the entire sentence in solitary.

The days feel different now. He thinks only of what he will miss. He talks to himself, holds entire conversations by acting out both parts, and wonders if he's going crazy or if he's always done this and never noticed.

One night he wakes up and everything is wrong. The cell looks like a funhouse. He screams and begs for it to stop. He considers hitting the panic button and fighting the officers when they arrive, but he resists.

Some relief comes when he finally reaches phase three, which allows him to load up on cookies, crackers and Cheetos until he's full for the first time in months. He's allowed more books and starts reading Homer's "Odyssey," "Night" by Elie Wiesel and a biography of black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. He's moved most by Hansberry's story, and saddened that she died at 34. He wonders what she would think of race relations in the world today.

I am glad she lived, he writes.

He sees the moon outside his window for the first time in months and stares at it until his eyes burn. He wonders how the Earth must look from the moon. He thinks about the arrangement of the cosmos and how if one thing fell out of place the human race would be wiped out. The delicate balance makes him wonder how some people cannot believe in God.

I think it's pretty clear that there is a god, he writes. Personally I've been spared and Blessed too much not to believe.

He gets a radio. He hears on NPR that the U.S. Treasury might put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. He can't believe it — a former slave on American currency! It makes him think about his own ancestry. My great great great grandparents were slaves. Great great grandparents the children of slaves. It's in the bloodline to survive.

In May, he reaches the halfway point to his solitary sentence and talks to Jamaal on the phone. Shay has told Jamaal his dad will be home for Christmas. Jamaal says he wants some books, PlayStation 4 and a Spider-Man game.

He asks if Rolenc will have to go back to jail after Christmas.

Rolenc says no and hopes it's true.

On a late-summer evening, Sharon takes Jamaal to soccer practice. On the way, they stop for a snack at a gas station. Jamaal buys some candy and parades out of the store with the boundless energy of a 5-year-old.

"He skips and runs just like his father used to," says Sharon, laughing.

They arrive at the soccer field, and Sharon straps on Jamaal's shinguards and cleats. The coach asks the parents to come help with drills, and Sharon fills in, running around the field trying to keep up with her grandson.

"I'm always the runner and I never get catched!" Jamaal announces proudly.

Sharon is trying to help Keegan find a lawyer to fight the new charges filed by Rice County. She first contacted a high-profile private attorney, but Keegan decided to turn instead to a public defender because the cost was so high. The trial is scheduled to begin this month.

Rice County Attorney John Fossum said his office doesn't treat charging decisions differently just because someone's already being punished in prison. "This was a pretty brutal, violent assault," he said.

Keegan's public defender, Erica Sutherland, called the charges excessive given that he was already punished with a year in solitary and an extension to his prison sentence. In an interview with Sutherland's investigator, Shay said she wanted the case dismissed, and agreed that the current punishment is severe enough.

Even if Keegan loses his case, there's a chance the trial could be postponed, meaning he would still get out of prison, if only for a month, on Dec. 20 — in time to spend Christmas with his family.

"That's the hope," Sharon said. "That's the hope."

In the meantime, Sharon is doing all she can to keep her mind occupied. She joins a second book club. She starts going to exercise classes almost every day after work. Still, the anxiety can be overwhelming.

While Jamaal runs drills on the field, she produces a note from Keegan that she found recently. He gave it to her on his own 18th birthday. "Happy Birthday," it reads, "for being with me 18 years into young adulthood and taking care of me."

Rolenc's looking at himself in the mirror. He catches the reflection of a correctional officer doing his rounds. He imagines what the officer thinks about. For Rolenc, prison has become normal. But for someone who's never served time, it's anything but normal. He tries to think objectively about walking through the halls of the ACU. It probably looks like a holding facility for animals.

It must have been a very cruel mind to come up with an invention such as this, he writes.

He longs for the distractions of general population: gym, phone, conversation with other inmates, regular visits from friends and family. He gets headaches every day for a week.

He talks to Shay on the phone, and they finally have an amicable conversation. It's taken a while, but he's relieved to feel like they've found a point of mutual respect.

Back in his cell, he hears other inmates yelling and kicking cells all night. He thinks about being free — a topic that frequently crosses his mind — but this time he's not imagining where he will eat first, or how he will surprise his son at home. Instead, he worries about jumping from prison back to the real world.

Does going home still feel the same when you haven't been there in years? he writes. I wonder if I will feel at home or if I'll feel like a stranger.

Outside his window, Rolenc sees three hot-air balloons flying overhead. One is purple, one is blue and one is black. He promises himself that next summer he will take a hot-air balloon ride, and he will fly over Oak Park Heights and look down to the ACU and reflect on the time he spent in the hole.

I'll think about my homeboys here at Oak Park and in Stillwater that got decades — or their whole life — to do behind bars. My heart will bleed for them.

I'll think about all of the brothers going through the struggle. Doing time. Sitting in segregation. Feeling like the world's against them ... Feeling like everyone has turned their back on them. I'll pray for them.

And I'll be humbled. And cherish the moment and my freedom. As I look down on where I came from — and where I'll never return to.

Andy Mannix • 612-673-4036