Mount Tamalpais College recently hosted UCLA School of Law Professor Sharon Dolovich, a leading scholar on prisons and prison law, as part of the college’s guest lecture series. The discussion shed light on the impacts of chronic sleep deprivation caused by prison conditions. In her lecture, Dolovich emphasized how conditions such as constant light exposure, traumatic violence, insufficient food, the harsh texture of prison blankets, and metal bunks all contribute to serious sleep disturbances.
Many attendees connected deeply with the subject, recognizing their own experiences in Dolovich’s findings. “It was hard to sleep for over five years before adjusting to a normal sleep habit,” said one MTC student after Dolovich’s lecture. Attendees also shared that they might spend five hours without food before bed, leading to theft, just to get enough to eat. Others mentioned that sleep is impeded by the constant noise of living in an open space dorm where there could be over a hundred people sleeping next to each other and sharing the same communal bathroom in one building.
“People who are incarcerated are sentenced to another level of punishment,” Dolovich noted, pointing to the myriad factors beyond legal penalties that may deteriorate both mental and physical health.
Dolovich’s study on sleep deprivation in prison is based on roughly 80 interviews; half were with formerly incarcerated individuals, and half were with current correctional officers. Her work with correctional officers explores how mandated overtime and double shifts may impact an officer’s sleep and the impact on incarcerated people when officers are chronically sleep deprived.
She found that the people she interviewed who had served time in prison opened up readily about their experiences, often speaking candidly about conditions they’d endured over decades of incarceration. Fourteen of her 39 formerly incarcerated interview subjects had served more than 20 years in prison, and eight had served over 25 years. Many began their sentences in juvenile facilities.
“I asked everyone: on average, how much sleep did you get per night?” Dolovich explained. She encouraged interviewees to reflect on various facilities and contexts—from solitary confinement to dorms—and how these environments shaped their ability to get adequate sleep. She also discussed environmental discomfort and dehumanization. When asked what it would take to improve the quality of sleep for people inside, some of those she interviewed pointed to specific changes like better mattresses, fewer nighttime bed checks, and single-cell housing.
Other interviewees spoke to the broader need for humane treatment. “People said, ‘We’re treated like we’re not human beings,’” Dolovich explained. “If the system treated incarcerated people more like human beings, better sleep would follow, because humane treatment would naturally bring about better conditions.”
Professor Dolovich stressed the health implications of this issue. Her study seeks to understand not only how prisons deprive people of sleep but also how that loss affects long-term health and wellbeing, not just for incarcerated individuals but also for the staff who work within those institutions.
