The following story was first published by the Sierra Nevada Ally.

It had been a long time since Frank De Palma had seen his own reflection. When a nurse at Ely State Prison finally handed him a mirror, the face staring back was a stranger — and Frank cried. He’d known his hair was gone, had seen his hands change, a topography of wrinkles and scars, but his face had aged unseen, without a witness.

For 22 years and 36 days.

In 1992, Frank was sentenced to solitary confinement. He stepped into the concrete cell no larger than a parking space, not knowing it would be decades before he’d leave it.

In that time, he would see no one, touch no one. Just four bare walls and silence.

“To say it was torture is an understatement. It was an agony beyond words,” he said. “A bullet to the head would have been more humane.”

Now 68, Frank lives in a small studio apartment in Reno with his cat, Fatty. His world is quiet again — but this time, it’s a quiet he chooses.

“That cell, by virtue of its purpose, stole from me everything that made me human by depriving me of it,” he told me.

We are sitting in Frank’s apartment living room. The blinds are drawn, but sunlight filters in and trickles onto the carpet, where Fatty is basking happily.

“No one to love, no one to love me, no one to talk to,” he said. “Speaking aloud just to hear your own voice. Capturing bugs and trying to feed them because it was alive. I learned the value of life amidst all that misery, all that hell. And so I did get something good out of it.”

In the seven years since his release, Frank has become a voice for the estimated 122,000 people held in isolation across the U.S. He has testified before lawmakers and written a book, Never to Surrender! 22 Years in Solitary: The Battle for My Soul in a U.S. Prison.

That’s how I came to know Frank — one of his book readings at a bookstore in Reno called The Radical Cat. Beyond his story, there was something about Frank that moved me deeply.

“If all those years are to mean anything,” he said, “it’s to give voice to the ones who haven’t made it out.”

An Act of Grief, A Life Rewritten

It was an emotional decision made at 18 — driven not by violence, but by grief — that would alter the trajectory of Frank’s life.

It was 1974, and Frank was living in Las Vegas. Frank’s closest companions at the time were a dog named Bud and his girlfriend he refers to as Vivian.

One afternoon, Frank was out walking Bud. Suddenly, the “neighborhood jerk,” known for speeding down residential streets in his truck, ran over Bud, killing him — and a piece of Frank’s heart — on impact.

Something inside Frank snapped. Frank ran to the driver’s home and spotted the truck in the driveway. He pounded on the door. When no one answered, he looked inside the truck — engine still warm, keys still in the ignition. So he got in, circled the block, and in a moment of rage, drove the truck straight into the house.

While no one was hurt, Frank was charged with grand theft auto and sentenced to 10 years in Nevada State Prison in Carson City, with eligibility for parole after two years of good behavior. He expected to serve quietly and come home. But in the prison environment, he said, that wasn’t an option.

By 1982, Frank — now 20 — had been behind bars for two years, keeping his head down and holding onto hope for parole.

At the time, Frank wrote, Nevada State Prison was largely controlled by gangs like the Black Mafia Family (BMF) and the Aryan Warriors.

“The gangs’ reach and brutality was all-encompassing,” he wrote in his book.

One day, two BMF members attacked him from behind. Frank fought back, injuring the gang’s second-in-command. Word spread quickly, and Frank learned he had been “green-lighted” — marked for death.

Over the next four months, BMF members jeered at him daily, taunting him about his impending fate. Frank was gripped by fear, consumed by the need to stay ready.

“One of the worst things about being targeted for death was not knowing when or from where the next attack was coming,” he wrote.

He briefly considered telling the guards, but he had seen their indifference too many times. And in prison, there’s nothing lower than a snitch.

The attack finally came one morning while Frank was playing cards with another inmate, Roderick Abeyta. The blade missed his neck but slashed his shoulder. Abeyta tossed him a weapon. Frank fought back, stabbing his attacker in self-defense.

As the man collapsed, he gasped his last words: “They told me to get you.”

Frank knew it was self-defense — and so did a porter named Chris Jones, who had witnessed the incident and backed up his account. But it didn’t matter. At trial, Abeyta changed his story, claiming Frank had asked him to sharpen the weapon beforehand — turning a spontaneous act into premeditated murder. Frank suspected Abeyta was trying to leverage the trial to reduce his own sentence.

Before the attack, Frank was due to be released in a mere eight months. But the jury convicted Frank of second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to five years to life.

The Violence of Silence

While Frank’s extended sentence was a result of his violent altercation, his initial placement into solitary confinement was not the result of any infraction.

He was called off his work detail one morning in February of 1992 and informed that he, along with 13 other “old-timers,” would be placed in solitary confinement — not for anything they had done, but as a precaution. It was a preemptive isolation in anticipation of incoming, younger gang members, and the administration wanted to isolate those with complicated histories.

His new home was a cell roughly the size of a parking space, where he would be allowed no visits. Reading material and radio access were denied. Recreation time — when it was allowed — meant pacing in a small outdoor cage.

Without the usual markers of time like routine or sunlight, Frank lost his ability to keep track of the years; time no longer held any meaning. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, Frank was slipping away.

“Cut off from everything natural and normal ... I sought to make friends with the beetles and the potato bugs that crawled around my cell. I talked to them, and using my index finger, I gently petted them,” he wrote about his time in solitary confinement.

Frank soon began spending each day adrift in an unending daydream, made up of imagined lives. Meeting a woman in the supermarket, falling in love. Becoming a father, determined to be a good dad. Meanwhile, every 90 days, a form was slid underneath his door informing him that his solitary would continue.

It is ironic — but perhaps not so surprising once hearing Frank’s story — that the move meant to prevent violence ended up provoking it.

“As for me, my own desperation and rage boiled over, and when a guard mistreated me, I retaliated violently,” Frank recounted in his book. “As punishment, I was sentenced to another 20 years in prison. Perhaps worse, the horror of solitary would continue for another 20 years.”

About a decade into his isolation, Frank’s internal world began to collapse. 

“In one horrifying moment, I realized there was no supermarket, no lovely wife, no son. I shrieked and cried aloud, joining in with the other voices of madness,” he wrote.

He attempted to take his own life, at which he was almost successful. But after surgery, he was brought back to the same cell, where he tried to sleep away his existence. When rest didn't come and the voices in his head grew louder, Frank would slam his head against the concrete wall over and over to make them stop.

“And that’s really the last thing I remember,” he said.

Of the 22 years he spent in solitary confinement, Frank says has no memory of the last six. Absorbed by the emptiness of solitary, he became a ghost.

“That nothingness, emptiness, became my whole life. The chaplain told me he would come to visit me, and I wouldn’t even realize he was there … I was told I was nothing more than an arm reaching for a food tray,” he would later write about the experience.

Outside the prison walls, time moved on. The Earth circled the sun 10, 15, then 20 times. The world welcomed a new millennium, was transformed by the invention of the internet. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and elected its first Black president. And, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture declared prolonged solitary confinement as a “cruel, inhuman” form of torture.

Through it all, Frank endured — his isolation eroding him, reshaping who he was and who he would become.

A New Freedom

After spending 22 years in a box, anything larger than the cell Frank had come to rely on threw him into a panic. So when prison guards came to release him on Tuesday, March 11, 2014, he begged them not to take him out.

“It took them more than seven hours to get me to come out. When I had to pack up my things, I didn’t know where to begin, so I just started spinning in circles. One of the officers came in and helped roll up my property. He said, ‘Just keep your eyes closed and hold onto me,’” Frank wrote in his book.

He was broken — physically and mentally. He couldn’t form a coherent sentence. His vocal cords were shot from disuse and he couldn’t walk without help. A far cry from the 36-year-old man who had first entered solitary.

Frank was transferred by van to Northern Nevada Correctional Center (NNCC) where he spent nearly a year in the prison’s psychiatric unit. But the damage had already been done — years of isolation had fractured his mind in ways that felt irreversible. Being around people felt alien.

At first, he could only bear two minutes outside his cell, wiping down steel tables just to stay occupied, then rushing back in like he was coming up for air.

Slowly, he built tolerance. A few more minutes each day. A short walk through the yard. Eventually, he was placed in the general population. But the fear lingered. The chow hall felt like a stadium. The noise overwhelmed him. He couldn’t bear having anyone behind him. Sometimes, he ate standing back to the wall. Other times, he left his tray untouched.

Once released from prison and back to civilian life, Frank was forced to adjust to a changing world, while contending with the fallout from the system that changed him. As he began to build a new life, he found a path toward advocacy, to help others avoid the same fate that he suffered for 22 years.

He found much of it in Nevada.

This story was reported and published by the Sierra Nevada Ally, a nonprofit organization focused on civics, climate and community news and education.